So, you're wondering "How to add 300,000-plus products easily?" Wandering around the Virtuemart forum, considering which ecommerce option I ought to use for an upcoming ecommerce web development project, I search for threads that shed light upon the status and direction of the open source project while simultaneously searching for threads I can contribute my experience toward assisting some one else. I consider it the least I can do for a project that has made my clients millions through the years. And I enjoy helping. But when I saw the reference to easy mated with the task of populating a website with 300,000-plus products, there was something there worth investigating.

I had mentioned I squeezed the trigger on a Gallery2 open source photo gallery install. Installing Gallery2 was quite simple. Though, integrating Gallery2 into the Joomla CMS was a bit more difficult but not like pulling teeth on a angry bear. I used the JFusion bridge component.

Recently the DIRT FORGE Blog performed a migration from a Wordpress blog on a sub-domain to a JoomlaWorks K2 blog wrapped within the Joomla CMS framework installed upon the root domain. While Wordpress remains one of easiest all-around web development platforms, especially for websites that require the capabilities of a blog or content management system (CMS), it has its limitations, particularly for projects that require or may require a relatively high level of integration with more mission specific software applications, such as e-commerce, photo gallery, file download repository and forum software. This is where the Joomla CMS framework excels.

I remember the days. I worked straight HTML. I wrote like a mad man. Lived the ultimate off-road lifestyle and documented the insanity by means of a camera, a keyboard and often times a satellite internet connection. Those were the days of Off-Road.com. There were editorial days that existed long before the ORC era of my life, but they do not size up to the workload, responsibility nor adventure. Traffic at ORC was ultimately bolstered by informative and often humor-laced excitement. And during that era of my life, it was far more difficult to web publish that excitement as it is today. Straight HTML via notepad and then manually publishing links via FTP file upload for an array of primary directory pages was an extremely tedious task. Homesite soon eased the HTML editing woes but also inserted erroneous code. Fortunately, Macromedia Dreamweaver segued onto the scene has long proven to be a standard asset in my code-slinging repertoire.

I generated my first Twitter account back in 2007. Shortly thereafter, I performed a few contextual posts to Twitter (Tweets) and audio posts to Utterz (now called Utterli).  This included posts generated from remote location at local races such as Mojave Desert Racing (MDR) and Mojave Offroad Racing Enthusiasts (MORE) but also SCORE Primm 300 and SCORE Baja 1000 races. During that time, all formidable websites offering coverage for these races, specifically the Baja 1000, were weak efforts. The only exception would be the Race-Dezert.com Weatherman Race Radio Live Audio Feed. But even that is rather limited in its redeeming value, which is an entirely different conversation. It wasn’t until mid-2008 that I began consistently using a Twitter account. My spike in Twitter activity was do in part to public relations guru Jim Graham (@RonJon), who is also a self-proclaimed pretty boy Class 11 VW racer, whose race addiction is delivered via @DesertDingo. There were other things that truly interested about Twitter, but it’s just as easy to blame it on Graham. Should you follow him, you might find his ever-changing array of avatars entertaining and even perplexing. While my fervor is for off-road racing, my primary interest in engaging Twitter was from the e-commerce perspective, since I have realized that e-commerce is indeed the driving force for financial sustenance behind the off-road industry.