Since the
first version of the Photoorder component for Virtuemart and Joomla was released, we have received a number of feedbacks. Today, we are glad to introduce a new version of Photoorder.
There are a lot of changes and improvements in this release. As for appearance, it looks more lightweight and simple now.
Here is a list of the most noticeable improvements:
-
Integration with Virtuemart products catalog. It saves you the trouble of creating additional pages for printed products or adding separate links to the menu. Now you can navigate to catalog and select printed products from here. Every product can use Photoorder component as well. To do it, just specify
photo-flypage.tpl in the Category Flypage option:
-
Displaying thumbnails for uploaded files. It requires replacing of some Virtuemart files, but we think it is worth it. However, the component installer backups all the replaced files and revert them back after uninstallation. Thumbnails are generated by Image Uploader and uploaded along with original photos, and thus no GD Library or ImageMagic is required.
-
Automatic update of the mini cart module. Mini cart (mod_virtuemart_cart) is a standard Virtuemart module which represents a cart in the sidebar area. In the previous version you was needed to refresh the page to update the cart after upload, but now it updates automatically.
-
Drag and Drop support! Drag and drop is the last trends in web design, for example, GMail
introduces drag and drop for email attachments not long ago. But Image Uploader supports drag and drop for the years! So we decide to change
three pane look to one pane. However,
Add photos... button still exists and allows adding files through the open file dialog.
-
Sorting of ordered images. Photoorder creates a folder for each order and moves all images from upload directory into this folder when a customer confirms the order. This feature requires modifications of Virtuemart files too. However, as it was mentioned above, all the original files are backed up and will be automatically restored when you delete Photoorder component. Photos are uploaded in the
components/com_photoorder/upload/ folder and when order is created all photos assigned to the order will be moved into
components/com_photoorder/orders/{order_id}/ folder.
There is more to come. I didn't tell about validation if customer specifies print format for all selected photos, or using ajax popups instead of standard javascript alerts, or numeric up and down buttons for quantity field.
Installation.Joomla has a great installation system, which makes installation as easy as couple mouse clicks.
Step 1: Install Joomla.
Step 2: Install Virtuemart.
Step 3: Install PhotoOrder.
That's all :) For more details about installing components in Joomla, read
this article first. If it happens that there is something goes wrong and you got an error during component installation don't be shy to post about your problems on this forum.
Configuration.Navigate to the
Components ->
Photo Order ->
Preferences to open the options window. There are not many options here. The most important is
License Key. You need to specify a valid license key for Image Uploader. Free trial can be requested from our
web site or with a special tool which is installed with
Image Uploader 6 SDK.
The advanced Image Uploader options are located in the
administrator/components/com_photoorder/templates/imageuploader.tpl.php file. Image Uploader is very configurable and has more
over 100 parameters. It will be crazy if we put all of them in the configuration window :)
Using.After the installation completes, you see a new category
Photos_sample with three sample products:
photo,
poster,
schildersdoek. This is just an example and you can remove them. There are two points you need to know when adding new categories and products. If you want them to be able to use Photoorder component:
- Set flypage to
photo-flypage.tpl for product category;
- Add
Photo attribute to the product attributes.
This is very important thing! Do not forget it when adding photo products.
That's all. Download and try it. Post any questions or suggestions here.
Thanks for reading!
Last update: 2010-05-31
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Download Photo Order Plugin for VirtueMart------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Edited by moderator Sunday, September 4, 2011 10:02:47 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
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