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.