Having a great shopping cart that integrated with Joomla would be a wonderful thing. Alas, we keep waiting. A couple years ago I installed Virtuemart (VM) Shopping Cart for a client and found it to be extremely buggy; for example, I had to hack the core files in several places to get it to work correctly. And then, about two months ago I had a client who wanted me to fix their VM installation. The thing was so unstable that we ended up replacing it with X-Cart Shopping Cart.
But after reading all the great reveiws on the Joomla Extensions site, including an “Editor’s Pick” from the Joomla Extensions editors, I figured things have improved: man was I wrong. VM is STILL a half-baked project. Some things about it are great, but it’s still full of bugs. For example, I downloaded the latest version, and it contains several bugs for a major function: Shipping. When I tried to add a shipper, I got a php error message. I searched the Virtuemart forum and found the answer and it required that I hack the core files, and the answer was more than six months old! A major bug and they haven’t fixed it for six months?
In additon, the USPS realtime shipping module that is packaged with VM doesn’t work. Again, you need to scour the forum to find out why. The USPS module packaged with VM no longer works with USPS and hasn’t for…. You guessed it: six months!
And I just scratched the surface. Who knows how many more bugs there are in VM? If you want to conduct ecommerce, you need a shopping cart you can depend on. Virtuemart is not an acceptable choice.
Here’s some advice to the developers of Virtuemart:
- Fix all the bugs.
- Start charging $$$ for your product so you can afford to….
- Fix all the bugs.
I’d be more than happy to pay $100 for a reliable Joomla shopping cart.
