Joomla / Virtuemart quirks - tricks

Every once in a while we come across seemingly simple installation/configuration projects where some particular element causes us issues! Here's a few of the more recent ones, I'll update this page as new issues are recorded.

Note! - there's nothing earth-shatteringly technical here, just basic stuff that isn't always obvious, even when you do this for a living!

Virtuemart

Many people are using PayPal for merchant account services, but surprisingly there doesn't appear to be a module that comes pre-installed in Virtuemart for integration with Paypal's Website Payments Pro. (at the time of writing this - check, in case your recent download of virtuemart has a module pre-installed). Now I'm talking about Website Payments Pro, and not the standard HTML module.

We've found on the last two projects that this paypal module works pretty well. It is a commercial module however, around $50 when we purchased it. When configuring the module you'll be asked for the following from Paypal -

Obviously I've blanked out the client settings, but you'll see the information that's required in Virtuemart to configure the module for Web Payments Pro - all of the information required can be retrieved from the client Paypal account, but there's a quirky thing to watch for when you're looking for the API signature. When an account is created with Paypal, it seems to default to creating a 'Certificate' and not a 'Signature'. So you need to first delete the Certificate in Paypal - profile - API settings. Then recreate but select 'Signature' and not certificate.

Otherwise the module is pretty easy to install and configure. We haven't bothered using the sandbox mode, we've always gone straight to 'live' without issues.

JOOMLA SEF and .HTACCESS

If you're struggling with the SEF URL setting and you create a bunch of 404 errors when setting SEF to 'on' in Global Config, then you may need to switch the .htaccess file on your server. We've found this to be the case with various hosts, including Go Daddy and Hostgator. If you need a copy of a working htaccess file, contact us via the links above.