A customer recently approached me with a very important "oversight" on the developers side for Virtuemart < 1.1.8. It seems that there is no way to add custom image alt tags to product images. By default, Virtuemart does add alt tags automatically, them being the product name. The problem is that sometimes if your products have punctuation in their names, then the alt tags don't display properly. Or maybe more important, if you are pursuing search engine optimization with your Virtuemart website. So I did some digging into the Virtuemart forums and found that no one had a good fix for adding custom alt tags to product images. So here is my latest gift:

Natively, Virtuemart provides pretty boring language for search queries that return no results.  When you search for something using the Virtuemart Search Module that doesn't have any results, the system spits out the following result: 

Your search returned 0 results

This works ok if your customers are browsing for blog articles or general pages but this really doesn't help you close any sales or at least guide your customers to get the information they need.

Check this out little guy that we just built: SCD Fisheye Menu Module

This little module gives your Joomla site a cool "Mac" like menu system that shows icons that EXPAND when you hover over them. This module was built from scratch by Simple CMS Design and is available at no charge for your Joomla! website.

Virtuemart is Joomla's very popular e-commerce platform.  And while the system is very powerful, easy to use, and free (open-source) it does lack a couple of things out of the box.  One of things that the developers of Virtuemart didn't entirely plan out is when a business sells to multiple types of businesses or consumers.  For instance, Simple CMS recently built a Joomla site with Virtuemart installed to sell art products.  These art products were sold to both businesses, consumers and non-profit organizations including government agencies like schools.  The company did charge for shipping via Fed-Ex, UPS and USPS but left the option up to the buyer as to which method they wanted.

The problem lay in that UPS offers two different rates, one for commercial addresses and one for residential.  The residential rate is higher.  Natively, Virtuemart allows you to choose whether to show a shipping rate for either or but doesn't allow you to choose both based off the customer.