Virtuemart is the best shopping cart solution around for Joomla CMS. Joomla, of course, just happens to be the best content management system around, so the combination of the two is a serious powerhouse. Joomla requires a template to operate. Virtuemart uses a theme, but since it runs inside Joomla, it works with the template also. That causes a lot of confusion for more novice users, so we would like to help clear that up. New online shop owners need to understand how they unique and look and feel of their sites will be generated.

Joomla separates form from function. Form is the template - the colors, the graphics, the layout (two-column, three-column), the menu system, etc. All of that is controlled by the Joomla template. But the functions of Joomla (entering content, displaying content, signing up users) are not really template dependent. In other words, you can switch templates at will and keep your site up and running. You might have to do some rework if the styles of the old and new don't match, but the main functions of your site are not really affected by swapping Joomla templates.

Okay, so a Joomla template owns the overall site. But within a Joomla page is a content area. That area displays an article, or it displays output from a component. A component is a sub-system of Joomla like a calendar or a shopping cart. It is designed to do some kind of job within the Joomla framework. 

Virtuemart is a component. When you go to a Virtuemart page inside a Joomla site, the part Virtuemart generates is the part inside the primary window of the site. See the screen capture to the right for an illustration of this. All the area in black is controlled by the primary Joomla template. The white area is the main body area which is controlled by the Virtuemart component, and that area gets its styling and capabilities directly from the Virtuemart theme. The Virtuemart Theme does not impact pages which are not part of the actual shopping cart. So your blog pages, your article pages, your calendar pages, etc. are not affected by the Virtuemart Theme at all.

Virtuemart ships with a pretty good theme as the default. We have used it on shops before, but it has its limitations. In fact, it was to give Virtuemart more capabilities like image rollover, image zoom, popup videos, and product information in tabs that we created the Flytabs VM theme.

But there is such as thing as a Virtuemart template. Sort of.  A Virtuemart Template is a Joomla template that is designed to create the overall look of a store. It puts in things like a shopping cart bar, more shop-like graphics, more readable colors, etc. Rockettheme.com and all the major template designers market one or more Virtuemart oriented templates.

Frequently, those templates come with Virtuemart Themes that will change the look and feel of the Virtuemart output, and may add some nice features.

So do you need a Virtuemart Template? Maybe. It dependes on whether you have a template picked out already or doing custom design work for the overall site. A Virtuemart-oriented template is going to dictate your look and feel to a considerable degree. It is going to own every page of your site. That is fairly intrusive, and lots of Webmasters or designers have other ideas than what a Virtuemart-oriented template offers.

But a Virtuemart theme, on the other hand, like Flytabs, only impacts the area of the site actually controlled by the Virtuemart component. The menus, banners, logos, other colors are all controlled by whatever template you desire. The Flytabs theme, or any other VM theme, will work inside the overall framework. VM themes use CSS, so they are easy to customize and can be made to match the overall site design. So you can pick your own look and feel for the site, and then make Virtuemart conform, rather than picking a Joomla template just because it is marketed to work with a store.

The other big question is functionality. The Flytabs VM Theme has practically everything you could ever want. It gets rid of lightbox popups, and replaces them with rollover images and a zoom main image. It has an integrated video player. The product information is laid out in tabs for easy shopping. The add-to-cart area is highly visible. And it is really easy to customize. So if those features (and more!) are important to your shop, then you need FlyTabs, but you don't need any special template to work with it. Flytabs will work with almost any template, so you can pick the template and then customize Flytabs as necessary to match the site.

So which is it - a Virtuemart Template or a Virtuemart Theme? Well, you have to have both a Joomla Template and a Virtuemart Theme of some kind. But, you don't necessarily need a Virtuemart-style template which is often expensive. And which Virtuemart Theme you need depends on what you need the store to do! The two decisions, which template and which Virtuemart Theme, are usually made independently, but they really help set your online store on the path to success - or not.

Nicholas Myrna is the CIO of CorFun and a Webmaster of multiple sites. He has been developing for the Joomla platform since its inception.