Have you ever wanted to work on a live website but don't want to disturb your users for an extended period? You can do this with quick work and clever ACL management right on the live site, but for large changes and code work, you really need to do the work on a development version. Luckily for Joomla users, setting up a development site is a simple procedure that will allow you to make improvements at your leisure, then copy them to the live site in a minumum amount of time.

One of the wonderful things about open source software like Joomla is the high degree of customizability. This is important when a project has specific requirements that might not be exactly common, and are therefore not natively supported. The shopping cart extension Virtuemart is no exception. Here is a quick pointer to add product type infomation and custom fields to Virtuemart category pages.

Despite being only a single shopping cart component within the larger Joomla framework, Virtuemart is a vast and complicated system in its own right. It is in many ways almost as large and complicated as Joomla itself with about 1500 files between the front and back-ends, as well as its own completely self-contained module and templating systems. I'll be covering Virtuemart in a number of future posts but here are a few quick tips to get started.