Topics

Joomla, kunena, jomsocial, simgallery, k2, jcomment, easyblog and a ton of plugins....

Vbadvanced CMPS/Vbulletin plus numerous add-ons and custom hacks.

My Other Site is stock Joomla 1.6.3 /w Stock Kunena and Feedgator

I generally use Joomla 1.5, JomSocial 2.2, Kunena 1.6, VirtueMart (sadly), and sometimes Zoo.

Anahita, Joomla1.5, Wordpress

@Nick - Why "sadly" on VirtueMart? Starting to look into that as an option, seems like it's a love/hate kind of thing. Curious what you're perspective might be.

Starting from scratch myself, so running Anahita... and... wait for it... well, that's it so far.

Purely Anahita at the moment ... I'm reluctant to add any Joomla components until I see which way Anahita develops. But sorely need more functionality (like allowing users to upload .PDF files.)

Anahita, Joomla 1.5, Wordpress and sweat

@Scott

VirtueMart is buggy to say the least. They're still using the same basic code from Joomla 1.0. It doesn't follow MVC architecture and making modifications to the way it functions is maddening. Their patches are hit or miss. I've had to roll back a few patches because it breaks something else thats more important to me than what it fixes.

Alas, VirtueMart is the only shopping cart that I can find that has front-end administration and that's really important for me as I have a large team that manages all of our products and orders that I don't want to give back-end access to.

Currently, they're upgrading to an MVC architecture and fixing a lot of the code for VirtueMart 2.0. The betas a very nice and much more stable. They're also suppose to be including templating via template overrides which will be a great addition.

Hmm. Good to know @Nick, thanks.

My eventual plans are to roll-in some kind of robust eCommerce, was considering a bridged sub-domain with J1.5 and VirtueMart as a temp solution with the long-term goal being to have something fully integrated with the Anahita core.

@Scott

If you're looking for an alternative, I'd suggest Hikashop. It's a really good eCommerce solution. I love their customizable checkout workflow, but they don't have dependent products (and front-end administration) which makes it a no-go for me.

@Scott

I haven't used Tienda but you may want to have a look at it.

Joomla, Magento, Anahita

For eCommerce Magento is great but requires a significant investment in time and learning. It can be bridged into Joomla if you so wish using Magebridge, but I've not yet tried bridging it into Anahita as I plan on keeping the sites separate.

If you want your shop to be highly extendable, sell internationally (complex tax, shipping, addressing etc) and to avoid a situation where something you want to do in the future simply isn't supported, go Magento. Otherwise there are simpler options and I like the sound of Tienda too...

Detractors cite performance as an issue, and you certainly shouldn't expect it to perform well out of the box, but with a little effort it can be made very swift. It does require beefier hardware than most setups though...

@Nick

We always release beta version of patches and updates for Virtuemart but sadly no one tests this beta releases everyone waits for the final version and than complains if something is broken, if users started testing these betas and gave feedback things would be better, here is a link to 1.1.9beta which is due for release mid/end of June, don't forget to give feedback.

@Peter are you in the Virtuemart team?

Was, now days I help with bugs.

@Andy - Have you had any good experiences in skinning Magento to carry over graphics / layout / menus from a related Joomla site? Looks like a good product, but I'm hoping to have a very unified user experience between the community domain & ecommerce subdomain.

@Rastin - Looks like Tienda has some good reviews, I'll download & test over the weekend. Thanks for the lead.

@Scott...Rockettheme has a Magento Club. Also have a look at their Mercado-Template. Its supporting all kind of e-commerce-components (like Tienda).

@ Scott I use IXXO Cart, and as its a Joomla component it resides 'over' your template so you can have an entirely seamless unity of your site, template and shop. Its quite expensive but very high end in professional features. the backend also is full customizable so you can also change all of IXXO to match your colors as well...

@peter awesome!

@Scott you're welcome!

@Scott - yes as James says you can go to a provider who produces templates in a both a Joomla and Magento version.

I chose to actually integrate as I wanted more than just look and feel integrated, in which case Magebridge is the way to go. No carrying over as this results in a single site, so the Joomla template styles the Magento stuff (once you apply necessary modifications). However, Magebridge or no Magebridge, Magento is a powerful and therefore hard to manage beast :-) I wouldn't recommend getting into it unless you have done a lot of research and are prepared to spend a lot of time getting it to work how you want.

That said, you can try Magento Go which is their SaaS version for free I think, less to worry about that way...

Another popular choice is Shopify - again SaaS but looks pretty good.