The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

This is an excellent extension to VirtueMart from Polished Geek which is designed to address many of the desired features effectively missing from VM2 custom fields. I have found, like so many others, that the current way VM2 handles custom fields is somewhat limiting and confusing. Individually, they work well but when you try to collaborate among a set of fields, many needed capabilities are missing.

For example, conditional fields, where the appearance of one field is dependent on the value in another. Individually defined VM2 custom fields seem to struggle at this. However, features like this are the mainstay of forms tools. In my case, I needed the ability to configure many, many thousands of variations of a single product based on a set of specifications that could vary with each configuration! There are more than 30 fields required to complete the configuration and more than a dozen for the specification. Breezing Forms Custom Fields for VirtueMart (BFCF for VM) provided that ability.

Readers of this review should know that as an early adopter of BFCF for VM, I had some influence on how the product evolved. As would be expected, there were issues along the way. I was very impressed with the experience, professionalism and promptness of the staff at Polished Geek. In the end, there were relatively few issues and all were dealt with effectively.

While BFCF for VM is an excellent extension, it is not without its challenges. You do need some knowledge of web based environments (of which I am a relative newcomer) and the ability, as with all forms products, to write some code (PHP and Javascript, as well as some CSS and SQL, all of which I am much better at now but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself proficient). It isn’t overly difficult to do but attention to detail is paramount!

If you need to work with a set of related custom fields in any capacity within VirtueMart, I recommend heartily that you have a good long look at BFCF for VM. It isn’t for everyone but it truly changed the way I look at VirtueMart custom fields. I believe that the VM community will find countless ways to make use of the capability inherent in Breezing Forms Custom Fields for VirtueMart once they understand its capabilities. The team at Polished Geek is to be commended for bringing Breezing Forms, a popular product in its own right, to VirtueMart.

It may sound a little corny but I believe this is a paradigm shift extension to VirtueMart. It’s the kind of extension the techno-geeks will love but easy enough that even relative newcomers to open source such as myself can learn to work it.

This is the way the Shipment Method should work in VirtueMart 2.0+ and I'm sure the team will improve it in future. However, Web Expert has put together a nice Shipment by State plugin that allows you to include a state, province or region along with country.

I experienced a little problem at first and Stergios reacted promptly and fixed the issue overnight. All in all, I am delighted by this little plugin and it is well worth the cost.

My thanks to Web Expert on a task well done!

Sheldon

Just downloaded the free version and it proved so easy and effective I upgraded to the PRO level. Easy to use, implement and it does what it says. Enough said!