Using k2mart or not?

Hi there,

I am about to set up a shop using either the bike theme or the boutique theme (potentially the black&white theme). So this question is really relating to all three, but had to pick one category for the question. I take it all three ecommerce themes have similar, if not identical, support ?

Having read up on all systems, I'm pretty sure I'd like to use K2 for the actual content of the site (as it gives more options when it comes to image management etc). And to use VM for the actual commerce products backend.

The real question I am left with is whether or not I should use the k2mart bridge between the two. Although I'll be setting up the shop, several non-techie people will be using it and maintaining both the content and the product stock backend. I'm therefore *assuming* that using k2mart might be a good idea, since it will mean just one interface for them?

Also, it *seems* that k2mart would allow me to use all the fancy k2 modules for displaying the content. For example I want to have nice square boxes showing product category images; when clicked it should take the user to the actual products within that category. I sense visually i have more options with k2 and thus k2mart would be the right choice?

Having read some forum posts though, it seems most answers around k2mart are very old. Is it still around and is it the best option for what I'm trying to do? Or should i just use VM directly, assuming all three of the mentioned themes already have direct support for it? And (?) they have support for using category images to navigate through the shop ?

Any tips would be most welcome

/Cheers,
Jelte

Hi

Yes all of this templates has support for VM and You wil be able to use VM instantly. But I'm a great K2mart fan so will always recomend that. Anyway it was not tested across this templates, but since it's being loaded as a plugin in some K2 layouts I cannot think of any problems You may have. So please go on and I'll help You if any problem occures.

OK, after trying a few different options this afternoon, I have settled on the Boutique template and purchased the k2mart extension. I can totally see why this is a lot easier than having to deal with the virtumart interface, especially since it means now all content is in ONE place.

However, I've been trying to achieve something that isn't quite working. What I'd like to do is have one of the boxes of position "header2" to display the category image of a specific k2 category. If the user clicks on it, he should be taken to the category page where all the products in that particular section should be displayed.

But I can't for the life of me work out how to display the category image in that position. I've tried pointing the news show pro module to the k2mart category, but nothing is shown (the position collapses). More to the point, I'm not even sure if i should use the news pro module, because I do not want to show the article/item in there... instead i want to show the category image and potentially title in there... Does that make sense?

Should I create a menu item with a different layout and have that position itself in that box or something?

Hi

First of all forget about sentence "K2mart category". It's no difference than regular K2.

About category images: You need a module to show links to categories, than a menu needs a category layout so module will know where to redirect.

About layout: our template got some files overwritten to better suit to design, which means some settings are disabled by purpose. You can simply disable that by renaming the file in /html/com_k2/templates/default/ to something different in the file responsible for desired layout (category.php for categoty layout, item.php for item layout, etc)

Hi

Both links You've send me to check in PM are leading to 404 error. Anyway I belive this can be a javascript conflict, becuase I'm making K2mart website for a client right now and looks like price is not showing because of some javascrpt issue. I've solved my probelm by using jqueryeasy plugin and stretching jquery version to 1.7.1