Hints for the use of the template system¶

This page is for users and designers and developers, but since users of the administrator level can also get inflicted with it, we moved it to the user chapter.

The new template system of virtuemart allows fine grained overrides for each category and product. Even the views can have different templates. We did not implement our own template system, it is based upon what is already there. So we have the joomla template system and some methods to overwrite, but this leads to some limitations.

The joomla template system is described here:

• http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_1.5_Template_Tutorials_Project
• http://docs.joomla.org/Understanding_Output_Overrides
• http://docs.joomla.org/How_to_override_the_output_from_the_Joomla!_core
• http://docs.joomla.org/Layout_Overrides_in_Joomla_1.6
• http://www.spiralscripts.co.uk/Joomla-Tips/using-template-overriding-with-joomla.html

The virtuemart default shop template is overriding the joomla configurations. You can choose in the configuuration the template and layout for the shop, the category and the product view and you can override these values per category and product.

The problem behind this construction is that the joomla template override system does only work for the template loaded by joomla. So when you have the "Rhuk_milkyway" template set as default in joomla, but you use for example the "Beez" template for categories and placed a layout for override in it, then it is not used! Because joomla looks only in the "Rhuk_milkyway" template for layouts.

So you can use a lot different templates, but the layouts must be stored in the template which is the default of joomla.