The Missing Link in VirtueMart

VirtureMart is excellent, but is even better when Taskhopper moves in next door. We have tweaked Taskhopper to do something that just about every store owner might find useful.

(If you don't know what Taskhopper is, click here first)

The Need: Improve Customer Service

The good folks over at AudioMagUS.com called us a few weeks ago wondering if we could make Taskhopper VM-aware. Here's why they were making the inquiry...

It's common that orders require specific actions beyond the normal packing and shipping part. Returns, refunds, exchanges, customers even have the nerve to call wanting to know when their order will arrive .. all of these details but nowhere does Virtuemart help you to manage tasks. That's because VM is not a task manager... which is why we morphed Taskhopper into a special version called TH-VM.

How It Works

It's pretty simple. You make a sub-domain off of your store and install a fresh copy of Joomla, then load and configue TH-VM. So for example, if your store is audiomagus.com, you might add a sub called support.audiomagus.com. TH-VM is a modified version of 1.1.2.5 (the most current version of Taskhopper) with a few twists.

How TH-VM is Different

TH-VM has a few fields removed (hidden actually) and a few labels renamed. Here's what the original TH task entry screen looks like:

... to make TH VM-friendly, we kept everything about the same, the big addition being the ability to pull records directly from your Virtuemart order table. What this allows you to do is insert order infomation directly into the TH task record. Here's what a blank TH-VM form looks like:

Instead of Projects, we renamed that to Request Type, but those are still just TH projects so these are updated in the normal fashion via the admin screen.

The Item Type was changed to Reason, which will contain dropdown items that might include something like this:

To populate the task record, you would click the tiny icon next to the Order Chooser.

Doing so will display every record in your store, which might look something like this:

If we had to describe what TH-VM is with a single JPG, it would look something like this.

TH-VM will be available this week (release date will be 18-May) should you want to add Taskhopper to your VM neighborhood. \

Fine print: TH-VM is built on Taskhopper 1.1.2.5, a secure/stable release of Taskhopper. However, we are not planning to extend this product as we are knee-deep in version 2.0. As soon as TH2.0 is finished, we will convert TH-VM to that release. So the bottom line, we are willing to help install and configure this product, but we will not be adding to this much beyond what you see here.

Here's some feedback from the company that gave us the idea.

A screen shot demo of TH-VM