Virtuemart on Joomla 1.7

In short if you have a Joomla 1.5 website that relies on Virtuemart, I wouldn't go beyond 1.5.3 yet. Virtuemart are still only at RC2 for Joomla 1.6 and none of the modules work yet. I thought I'd have a try at upgrading though to see what happens.

First thing I did was take a full site backup so I could rest at ease as I butchered the site. I went ahead and downloaded the Jupgrade component and when I tried to run the upgrade, it kept hanging on the checking requirements screen. The Jupgrade instructions recommend to uninstall anything that is J15 only which includes Virtuemart. Then I continued disabling plugins until it eventually ran.

You then realise that your site is still the same because all that Jupgrade has done is create a second site in a sub folder called /jupgrade. So you need to go in via an FTP client and blow away the old site and move all the jupgrade contents to the root folder.

First thing I noticed is that it was version 1.6.3 of Joomla which then needs to be updated to 1.6.5 to be stable. And virtuamart was gone because I had to uninstall it to be able to upgrade Joomla. I then installed virtuamart 1.9.8. On the virtuamart site they say the core is compatible with Joomla 1.6 however when I installed it I just got a PHP error. It was at this point I confirmed for myself that if virtuemart is required then its best to stay with Joomla 1.5.3 for now.

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Posted: 5 months, 3 weeks ago by josh #3

I've now updated to Joomla 1.7.3 and I also received an email from virtuemart which was very defensive to say the least. Just proves they must be getting hounded with questions about when will V2 be ready and stable. Looks again like the core is ok but the plugins are playing up. I'll install it on a test server this week and see how far we get and post a new article.

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