Dutch-speaking people now have their first-ever VirtueMart Book! Today Gert Jan Fierlos mailed me that his book "MyStudy VirtueMart" has been published and is available from the Van Duren Media Web Site.

Thank you for your work Gert!

Meanwhile the work on the German VirtueMart Book is nearly finished. It's planned to publish the book at the end of January 2009. The book will be accompanied by the launch of a German VirtueMart web site.

Yesterday I was informed by our Server Hosting Company that one of our Servers must go offline for 5 hours from 11 p.m. (Thursday December, 4) - 4 a.m. (Friday December, 5). They are renewing and reorganizing the Central Power Connection for their Server Center.

This means that for at least 5 hours the Extensions Site, the Developer Portal and JAdCenter are not available. Most of our users worldwide will hopefully not even notice the short outage.

Now that Joomla! 1.5.8 has been released, I have updated our VirtueMart eCommerce Bundle to this new version. Not only this, but as announced earlier, this new Bundle includes new Sample Products and a new default Template (JoomlArt Larix, specialized for VirtueMart - including a custom VirtueMart Theme).

Another useful component will also be included for the the first time with the new Bundle: CustomQuickIcons. It replaces the default Control Panel with custom Links (one to your VirtueMart installation, of course).

Download the new VirtueMart  eCommerce Bundle

I recently wrote about Jafilia, an open source affiliate solution for VirtueMart + Joomla!.

I think it's more than fair to also mention one commercial affiliate solution, which supports VirtueMart+Joomla!: VM Affiliate . It's is a complete affiliate solution designed specifically for VirtueMart and Joomla! It is J!1.5 native, and VM 1.1 compatible, yet supports any older version.

It is completely built upon the VM and Joomla! framework, easy installation via a Joomla!-like installer.

It's nicely integrated into the site's frontend, and also uses VirtueMart's administration style in the backend.

Due to its integration in VirtueMart, many tasks that are done manually in ordinary affiliate software, become automatic in VMA, such as commission approval/removal and so on.

VM Affiliate is easy to use, but yet very powerful - making affiliate marketing a much more simple job for any VM shop owner.

You should give VM Affiliate a try.

Switzerland gets its own first Joomla!Day! After we had the Joomla! BootCamp in May Lucerne, now the same City was chosen for the Joomla!Day Switzerland, which will be on November 15, 2008.

I'm sure it will be a great event, because we will have the chance to hear & see great speakers, like:

• Wilco Jansen (Joomla! Development Team Coordinator)
• Johan Janssens (of JoomlaTools)
• Hagen Graf (Author and Koryphäe on all areas)
• Angie Radtke (specialized on Web-Accessibility, Co-Developer of the Beez Template)
• Beat of the Community Builder Team