Chapter 18. Extending Your Site: Recommended Solutions

It is time to introduce you to Helen. Helen is a pet owner and also the owner of a small pet store. Like most small businesses, her marketing budget does not leave room to hire an outside agency to build her a full-featured website with all of the bells and whistles; however, using Joomla, Helen is able to build and maintain her site with ease and within budget.

The following sections contain common problems users frequently solve with Joomla, and describe which extension we feel is the best solution for each particular problem. We have debated and weighed the pros and cons of each solution in order to provide you with the best extensions for each particular problem. We even found ourselves excluding extensions that we love for fear of overwhelming novice Joomla users with complex extensions.

At the end of each section, we also will mention other extensions that could be used to solve the particular problem.

E-Commerce: Set Up a Simple Online Storefront Using VirtueMart

  • Extension: VirtueMart

  • Website: http://www.virtuemart.net

  • Cost: Free

  • License: GNU/GPL

  • Minimum requirements: Joomla 1.0 or 1.5, PHP 4.2+, MySQL 3.23+

When it comes to e-commerce solutions, you don’t need to look any further than VirtueMart to set up an online shop and shopping cart. Whether you want to sell your goods domestically or internationally, you’re covered. It would be impossible to explain every feature VirtueMart has to offer without writing a separate ...

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