I’m doing deep research into the K2 Joomla component because I’m strongly considering using it for an Article Directory project I’m now involved in. This directory needs functionality that will enable users to join the website, post their own content, upload images and videos, provide commenting, tagging, etc and all of this in a straightforward and simple way that even technically challenged users will still find it easy.

K2 looks fantastic for this – we can set image resizing options and quality in a parameter – so images that are uploaded will automatically be converted to these dimensions and quality settings. This is something I love about Wordpress and now with K2 it looks like we are going to be able to do this easily in Joomla as well.

Lots of other great looking features under the hood – the main thing that K2 does is lets you add additional fields to your content items – so for instance you could add a download field to the bottom of each article if you wanted to create a downloads site, etc.

I won’t harp on but encourage you to watch the video above. I will be posting about my experiences developing with K2 as I go so stay tuned and subscribe to the feed.

In other news I have recently been talking to a friend and fellow Joomla developer about building a Joomla affiliate store. She has done a great job with her Halloween Costumes store built with Joomla. She has used a Joomla component to import a feed of products as opposed to adding them one by one as I did with the ipod nano cases demo site.

This will obviously save a lot of time and I’ve had many questions about doing this since posting my original article on the topic. The extesion is a commercial one provided by http://joomlashopbuilder.com/

It’s been a big week completing the new template as well as the new shopping system. And for all our effort and testing we got rewarded with an unexpected Virtuemart Paypal error, Typical.

“Paypal does not allow your country of residence to ship to the country you wish to”

With much confusion and googling we discover we’re not the first to experience this error; And it’s not specific to Virtuemart. UberCart and other cart systems have also scored this error. Sandbox.paypal.com test accounts don’t produce the same results so this error isn’t discovered until the shop goes live (we’ll for all our test accounts no errors were produced. Your cart and Paypal configuration may be different). Now I can’t help a whole bunch with other systems but I did find a work around for Joomla + Virtuemart.

In our Virtuemart admin area we can select ’store’ then ‘list payments methods’, I have Paypal as my only active payment method. In the ‘configuration’ tab we get to set some parameters for pay pal like our  Paypal email. In the ‘extra info’ text area there is a bunch of PHP which pulls the users data and product info to be sent to Paypal for purchasing. It all looks dandy, until you configure Virtuemart for downloadable goods. Virtuemart 1.1.2 offers a nice revised check out to its earlier releases; We now get to skip all the billing and shipping info when we configure Virtuemart for downloads. This is good for the shopper which is always good for merchant. However in our first few lines of code in ‘extra info’ we’re still trying to pull the users ‘country code’.

Virtuemart

$db1 = new ps_DB();
$q = “SELECT country_2_code FROM #__vm_country WHERE country_3_code=’”.$user->country.”‘ ORDER BY country_2_code ASC”;
$db1->query($q);

With no billing or shipping info the Virtuemart user data goes to defaults in the database. Mainly a lot NULL’s a couple of 0’s and one ‘US’ which is the default country code in the database. Lucky for us it’s easy to fix. If you look further down the PHP extra info (around line 22) you’ll find a line with “address_override” => “1″,. This is some Paypal API to help the shopper with payment when they get to Paypal. With out all the data fields this causes error, but it’s OK we don’t want the address/billing info anyway.

To resolve:

Change line 22 “address_override” => “1″, to “address_override” => “0″,. With this set Paypal wont try and gather all the other address information which isn’t there.
And to save 0.004 of a second we can delete the database request on the first 3 lines or comment it out.
//$db1 = new ps_DB();
//$q = “SELECT country_2_code FROM #__vm_country WHERE country_3_code=’”.$user->country.”‘ ORDER BY country_2_code ASC”;
//$db1->query($q);

The free version of PolarBearPro can be found in our downloads area – the template details can be found here.

The template demo is something we’re quite proud of – To liven things up we built an affiliate store for iPod Accessories using Virtuemart and products from various affiliate product directories.

We started out thinking the demo would just look more appealing if it had a purpose, and some content that reflected a real world example of what could be done with a Joomla site and some free extensions.

In the end we realized this could be something our readers would be interested in learning how to build for themselves.

So here goes: The store was built entirely using free tools. Any products sold generate commissions for the store owner and you don’t have to carry any stock or deal with customers. It’s also an online business that won’t cost you a penny to setup!

We built our online store with the following free tools:

• Joomla – Get your free copy of the best CMS under the sun here.
• Free Joomla Template – made by us
• Virtuemart – Fantastic free shopping cart for Joomla.
• Free PepperJam Affiliate Account. PepperJam has a huge list of advertisers whose products you can sell in your own affiliate store.

If you don’t have a hosting account you will need one – It’s about the only thing you will pay for and it’s a cost that comes with running almost any site (except your free blogger blogs, etc).
If you are just getting started and don’t already have a web host then a very reasonably priced Joomla host I like is iPower – plans start at less than $50 per year. You can also register a domain name through them.

Over the next few days I will be working on a full step-by-step tutorial explaining the entire process we went through to achieve what you see in the demo. Every step has been screen captured so you can see just how easy it is to put together your own store.

If you find the idea of building your own store like this exciting then subscribe to our feed or email update service and be the first to get the guff.