After spending a lot of time and money on modification to Art From Steel we learnt that the current setup cannot run under PHP5.

Our webhost will be disabling PHP4 next month and rather than spend more time patching up the current site, we’ve taken the plunge and upgraded both Joomla and VirtueMart. to version 1.53 and 1.1.1.  Whilst these numbers don’t seem like much, those with experience can attest that the upgrades make huge leaps forward from what we’ve previously worked with.

We’ve spent a lot of time with Joomla over the past few months and have an excellent understanding of how to configure it.  We are able to put a functional site together with a nice template, valuable components and modules within a couple of hours now.  We then need to add content and get custom graphics created.

We’ve built 4 sites in the last 3 days.  They all require more content, graphics and tweaks before they’re ready but we’re delighted with the increase in our productivity.

We are working on these new sites in the background and once things are ready we’ll activate them.

A few features we’re excited about on most of these sites are:

• Improved site designs with modern clean images and styles
   
• Improved coupons and gift vouchers
   
• An integrated blog for each major site
   
• Improved shipping cost calculations
   
• Accounts for wholesale and retail clients with different prices and order quantities
   
• Testimonials:  text, photos, audio and video
   
• Reviews and star-ratings for each product
   
• Integrated link pages
   
• Mailing list subscriptions built into the member registration form.
   
• An RSS Feed for each site

As these sites get completed, expect more updates from us. Realistically we’ll be moving nearly all of our significant sites to Joomla over the coming few months.  We are huge Joomla fans and love how easy it is to modify and expand site that use it.