Setting up a Development Environment¶

Introduction¶

If you start developing for the project or just with VirtueMart you may have already set up a development environment with an IDE and a SVN program.

If you haven't done so or if you want to know what to do better, you can follow the instructions given on this page.

The following programs are recommended for working with VirtueMart and synchronizing the working directory with the local SVN repository:

•SmartSVN (a very easy, but professional platform-independent SVN program)
•Total Commander (perfect for sync'ing the contents of two directories)
•Ant (for building installable packages)
•Zend Studio (the state of the art when it comes to a PHP IDE, costs!)
•or PHP Development Tools for Eclipse (very good PHP IDE and free!)

Of course there are other programs that can do the same as the ones mentioned above, but remember: these are just recommendations.

Setup an IDE and SVN¶

If you want to join the project it is important that you have a similar environment like the other devs, so it makes it easier for everyone to help each other.

First setup up an IDE, I suggest you follow the explanations here: http://docs.joomla.org/Setting_up_your_workstation_for_Joomla!_development

After that download the installer of virtuemart and install it in joomla. AFTER that configure the SVN.

The SVN folder structure is setup with 3 root folders; trunk, tags and branches. The trunk folder is used for curent active development. The tags folder is used for public releases. The branches folder can be used for code branches.

The structure found under these root folders mimic the structure in a typical Joomla installation, however, only contain the VirtueMart code. This gives us the ability to easily commit and checkout directly from a Joomla installation as described above.

There are 3 different folders for backend, frontend and modules

•trunk/administrator/components/com_virtuemart
•trunk/components/com_virtuemart
•trunk/modules/(..not ready, we are pleased if you want to write a module)

The /trunk is your joomla base root = jRoot.

At best is if you have a joomla installation and make 1 checkout for back and frontend. Before you can checkout the svn you should delete the files that are installed by the vm installer. Just delete this directories

•administrator/components/com_virtuemart
•components/com_virtuemart
and the language files named en-GB.com_virtuemart.ini in
•administrator\language
•language

use for checkout on the joomla base root:

svn co https://dev.virtuemart.net/svn/virtuemart/trunk/virtuemart

After updating you should have the newest version of VirtueMart

If you want to check the mails you may want to use hamster as mailserver