In the past weeks several people have been pushing me to help them with their virtuemart sites and make them multi-lingual. And yes we achieved it. There are some pitfalls which are related to the way how information is created, stored and used within virtuemart but in general it works.

One thing that I found quite helpful was the usage of the direct translation module that is included in the Joom!Fish package. Never heared of it? May be you have seen the little Joom!Fish logo next to your status bar and wondered why it only tells you about the current default language. This is the default setting if you use a component the module does not know. But actually you are able to teach your direct translation module to work together with any component of Joomla.

For virtuemart we added the possibility to directly translate the products in the virtuemart product list. To achieve this go to your module manager and get your Direct Translation module properties (this is an administrator module ). In the parameter section you find several lines with config values. Just add the following code to one of those lines.

com_virtuemart#vm_product#product_id#page#product.product_list

This additional configuration will allow the direct translation module to identify which product you want to translate. It opens a modal window in which you can process your complete translation.

Beside that we have come accors some more smaller issues. E.g. the attributes for products are stored within the product itself and if you want to translate them you must translate them for all your products manually. This is kinda exhausting as there are reference tables but you can not easily update all your products with the correct names. The topic here is that this is not a translation issue but related to the way virtuemart stores the information. I can understand why this is done. On the other side I have some ideas how we can get around these issues and what we can improve. Anyhow for now I will work on a new package of the virtuemart content element files and include some more additional filters and other additional options. This should make the work with virtuemart more easy. Last but not least I will write a documentation about it and hopefully get this published in our new documentation section for Joom!Fish 2.0 topics.