The VirtueMart forums are full of complaints like:

So, here's the much awaited fix!

More and more users are switching to Google Mail, Hotmail and other free mail services these days. It's a great move... unless you have VirtueMart and your Joomla is set to send your mails through SMTP. You may easily end seeing something like:

The mails from other Joomla apps are sent, just the VirtueMart is behaving badly. Weird thing is, that you can see in the main Joomla config the mailer set up properly, and the port to be used is 465, as required for Google Mail, but as you can see the error message indicates that VirtueMart tries to use port 25! The problem is that VirtueMart has a code flaw, when sending mails through SMTP the port 25 is hardcoded, and isn't inherited from main Joomla configuration file.

The fix is relatively easy, but you must get your hands dirty with some PHP code.

You might experienced this, the links in the Alphabar are sometimes misbehaving, the module assignments in the resulted pages are gone off, if you have some fancy module to menu associations set in your SoBiPro powered site. Obviously, this is an ItemID handling problem, and, unfortunately can be fixed only with a core hack.

SoBi Pro is great... but misses some basic features, as adding a prefix to a field (might be as simple as willing to add the "dollar" signe as prefix, and not as suffix), and the templating is powerful - but criptyc even for an average Joomla developer. Recently I had to build a site wich had a special need - to display the last 4 digits of a person's Social Security Number, in the format ***-***-1234.

Recently I had to build a kind of people directory (ouch, this was  too "politically correct" - in fact a backlist of bad customers for a group of antrepreneurs) and the obvious choice was using of SoBi Pro. But the project has couple of special challenges, and I needed to develop couple of tricks to match my client's needs.

When a registered user adds a new entry in your SobiPro powered business directory in your Joomla site you might want to add a link pointing back to his Community Builder profile. Sounds simple... but the powerful templating system of SobiPro might be cryptic even for advanced users. And you might not have a membership in SobiPro club - BTW, worth every penny!

Here is one way you can do this!