Joomla/Virtuemart Background

Virtuemart was the first e-commerce plugin for Joomla and remains the most popular. The roots of Virtuemart can be traced back to the 'Mambo-phpShop' plugin for the Mabo CMS platform from which Joomla was derived, and as Joomla iitself evolved to the 1.5 release, Virtuemart went with it all the while refining its code base and improving the depth and robustness of its integration with the Joomla core.

Since Virtuemart sits so well with Joomla's native content handling functionality, its no wonder that it has become such a popular e-commerce platform, particularly for store owners who were either initially drawn to Joomla for its general CMS functionality and wealth of plugins and then later decided to open a store on top of that, or for people who started off wanting an online store, but realized that the content-management features of dedicated open-source e-commerce platforms was too limited and couldn't reliably cope with the blogs, articles and other content frameworks they wanted to use to help promote their products.

And yet in comparison with dedicated e-commerce solutions Virtuemart would start off at a disadvantage, lacking several features which could be found in 'out-of-the-box' dedicated platforms. Whilst many of these shortfalls have since been addressed by Virtuemart plugins, the handling of images linked directly to selectable product options has always been lacking. Until now.

'Out-of-the-Box' Product Image Handling in Virtuemart 1.1.x

When setting up a product in Virtuemart, the user must click the 'Product Images' tab and will then have the opportunity to upload a single image for that product. A thumbnail for that image can then either be generated automatically by Virtuemart or uploaded separately by the user. The image and its corresponding thumbnail are displayed in the same page after upload.

A little counter-intuitively, adding further product pictures is not done in the same page. Instead, the user must go to the product listing page and locate the 'Media' column of the row pertaining to the relevant product. Clicking the icon within the field will open a dialogue box where unlimited new images can be uploaded for display in the product display flypage.

And that's it. You can add as many new pictures as you like and give them a title each, but there is no way to directly link them to product options in a way in which gives users the ability to make option selections via the thumbnails themselves. This is where PAPs comes in.

What Product Attribute Pictures (PAPs) Can Do For Your Virtuemart Store

Whilst there exist a number of Virtuemart extensions which focus primarily on providing stylish picture galleries and specific Javascript popup engines, none offer the choice of over 10 popup engines, with watermarking, positioning, thumbnail effects, swatches and CSS tooltips all configurable via one admin panel as PAPs does. And crucially, none provide linkage between product options and images as PAPs does. This linkage allows users not only to make product option selections by clicking on the option thumbnail (the default Virtuemart dropdowns are automatically updated to reflect the new selection), but also allows store owners to create merged and liked product option images which represent combinations of two or more product options as they are selected.

We believe this kind of dynamism and control over your product option pictures will put your Virtuemart store ahead of the competition. for a full list of features, see our feature list page.