I’m thinking it might be a good idea to record the changes I’m making to Joomla 1.5 for posterity. Hopefully I can consult this post when setting up a similar site in Joomla in the future and others can as well. So here goes.

1. First thing — installed Joomla, then installed the VirtueMart package. All is right in the universe, install goes well both running fine.

2. Delete all test content from system and all un-necessary menus. Left with topmenu and usermenu. Please note – top menu is what I consider to be the main menu, some have had the experience of losing their home page. All you have to do is add Home to the menu, indicate it as the front page, then in the Menu Item Manager select it and indicate it as the default. That will then indicate this page as the home page.

3. I like my sites to have a top menu consisting of sections and a left (or right) hand menu that dynamically populates with the categories corresponding to the selected section. To acheive this, I installed the very handy Categoris 1.5 Module, found here http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/structure-&-navigation/sections-&-categories/2423/details. There are several others like it but from my experimentation this is the only one that auto populates based on selected section. I did edit the helper.php file, as the option to show empty categories didn’t seem to work, commenting out line 161, which makes sure empty categories show up.

4. Making the VirtueMart module appear when in the products section of the site. I created a menu item on the top menu that points to VirtueMart, when clicked, it takes the user to the VirtueMart part of the site. I only wanted the product categories to show up when in the Products (VirtueMart) section. To get this to work I edited the mod_virtuemart.php file in the mod_virtuemart directory. I simply added the following code to the top of the file, and closed out the if at the end of the file. Basically this excludes the virtuemart code if we are not in the VirtueMart part of the site.

if($option==’com_virtuemart’){

5. Enabling Search Engine Friendly URLs – used this 
http://e-fusionsoft.com/downloads/category/1-extension-specific-plugin.html
to make SEF Urls for Joomla.

Web site maintenance is the ongoing process of updating content, design and functionality of a web site. (continue reading…)

This phase occurs before hiring a designer/developer/company. Before requesting a proposal from a potential designer/developer/company you will need to collect and summarize your ideas about your project. (continue reading…)

Web site promotion is the continuing process to promote a web site to attract more visitors to the web site. (continue reading…)

Search engine optimization is the process of discovering keywords and optimizing your site so that it will rank highly in the search engines for them. (continue reading…)

Social Media Optimization is the process of creating profiles for your business on various social networking sites, maintaining these profiles and encouraging site visitors and customers to interact with you on these social networking sites. (continue reading…)

These services generally sell paid listings on a pay-per-click or PPC basis. They are also sometimes called CPC or cost-per-click search engines. (continue reading…)

Affiliate programs are programs in which other site owners will place links to your site and/or products on their site. (continue reading…)

These list products from many different companies in one place and can be a good source of sales for your company. (continue reading…)

The design process begins with the designer producing mock-ups of the initial design direction. This may consist of one standard sub-page or a home page and sub-page. (continue reading…)