VirtueMart, the popular opensource shopping cart extension for Joomla, have announced the availability of the release candidate of version 2 of the package.

The long awaited release of VirtueMart 2 means there will be one final bugfix and then the software will be ready to use in production. Also in the announcement was news that Joomla 1.6 is not being supported in this release after all. The developers say that as Joomla 1.6 is only being supported by Joomla for 6 months, and 1.7 will be out in around 2 months time – therefore they have not had enough time to develop VirtueMart around Joomla 1.6.

No doubt this news will disappoint some developers who have been eagerly awaiting a fully featured ecommerce add-on compatible with Joomla 1.6, but VirtueMart 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch and will fix many of the outstanding gripes people have with the extension.

The Release Candidate contains a lot new features:

– Media Handler (multiple images)

– Custom Fields (replacing the old attributes, producttypes, variants,…)

– True Child Products in the sense of OOP (unpublished parents can be used as linked product pattern)

– Mail template system

– New Currency Formatting possibilities

– More Modules and Plugins

– New Admin Menu Layout

– Meta Tags

– More Filters and Search Options

– Completely Anonymous Checkout

– Revenue Report

– New Templates

2020Media can provide a completely free installation of VirtueMart with any of our Joomla hosting plans – seee www.2020media.com/plans for further details.