Recently a co-worker asked my help for a seemingly trivial problem, he complained that whatever he does, the template overrides for the invoices done by the book aren't working. Well, the cause is simple - and is not really qualifying as a hack for non-rookies, but since the solution involves deleting files in Joomla's filesystem, the procedure can harm your site. So, put your helmet on, fasten your seat belt, and do a backup.

Recently one of my clients needed an interesting feature: to have different, un-related prices for the products in his shop for each "currencies" he wanted to use. The quote signs aren't by mistake there, one of his "currencies" was for example Payments in USD from China... Interesting currency, what you think?

At the first the problem seemed to be simple: since the existing VM framework let you define any kind of extra currencies, and also let you enter prices for products in all of your currencies, the logical step was to simply switch off the currency converter plugin, as was possible in VirtueMart 1.1.9 and earlier versions.

But there is the first catch - this is no more possible.

It's a know fact between VirtueMart insiders, that you can use Joomla plugins in the product descriptions. For that you need to enable this by clicking a checkbox in VirtueMart's main configuration (VirtueMart Admin > Configuration > Global tab > Enable content mambots/plugins in descriptions? checkbox.)

But what if you want to use plugins elsewhere, in other spots of the VirtueMart pages? For example in some other spot of the product details page - let's say to insert an availability calendar module under the main product image?

Right, you can do it with a little code hack! Let's make our hands dirty with some PHP then!

By default, in the VirtueMart 1.1.* Store Information settings you can add only one e-mail address in Contact Information box. All important mails - as new order notifications, for example, will be sent there. What if - for various reasons - you need to add more, than one e-mail address?

I am angry on Easter bunny. Really... He delivered to me a nasty surprise: lots of my customers complained during/after Easter weekend, that their shops, sometimes the Easter's week began to malfunction: the users using PayPal as payment gateway aren't charged correctly. After studying the problem, I found, that is happening on shops running versions of VirtueMart 1.1.3 to 1.1.9, charging shipping to customers and using the old PayPal API to communicate with the gateway. More precisely, the sipping net amount was not transferred, the shipping tax was sent correctly.

Then, by searching for "virtuemart shipping not transferred to paypal" I discovered, that I am not alone: there where some 54k+ search results returned!

What? A shopping cart with users which can't actually shop?

Weird or not, that was a recent request from one of my customers. He wanted to have a quick way to prevent some of his users from putting products in cart, but leave all other site functionality intact.