Who this book is for

This book is written for anyone who wants to learn the working of VirtueMart and try extending its capabilities. You may be the owner of a Joomla! VirtueMart web store or a designer working with Joomla! VirtueMart. If you want to customize VirtueMart to unleash its enormous potential and elevate your store to the next level, this book is for you. You must have some experience with VirtueMart and understand its basic features. You also need to know HTML, basic CSS styles, and should be comfortable taking up some challenges in PHP and JavaScript programming.

The book is especially useful to web designers who are comfortable working with graphics, HTML, CSS, and have some ideas of what JavaScript and PHP are all about. To get the most from this book, you should be familiar with administering a VirtueMart web store, well-versed with the basic features, and have a basic understanding of its advanced features such as child products, advanced attribute, custom attribute, and product type. You will find that many interesting extensions will be based on these advanced features.

You must be able to read and write clean HTML and probably know the basic CSS styles. You may not know anything about programming yet but must have a drive to learn. Hacking into VirtueMart can sometimes be simple. But for any extensive and functional hack, it probably will take some effort and time. So you should be prepared for some hard work and endure the dark valleys of testing and debugging. We will introduce ways to help you spot errors along the way. But testing and debugging is still inevitable.

While this book is useful for web designers, we have tried to make the book easy and practical for readers of diverse backgrounds. As Joomla! and VirtueMart are constantly evolving, any customization projects have to bear in mind future compatibility. While there is no absolute way to guarantee 100 percent compatibility with the next version, the examples within this book have been designed to reduce upgrade impact. Throughout the book, we have demonstrated various techniques that help to make the hack upward compatible. Within the exercises, there is no hacking into any VirtueMart core files. We also tried to restrict our changes to as few files and as few places as possible. In order to achieve that, sometimes we may not adhere to the standards that professional developers and designers will follow. For example, we may use inline CSS styles in place of an external stylesheet just to make our changes easier to manage. We will put database logic inside the template file to avoid changes to the core files. All these are not considered best practice by professionals. In these cases, you are definitely free to apply your own expertise to improve the code.