only display Virtuemart products based on registered login - joomla

Question

We are trying to setup a simple BTB site to support our retailers (somewhere they can download product text/images and corporate branding). We are using Joomla 1.5.2 and Virtuemart 1.1.9
We want it to be completely secure (unregistered viewers - and competition - just see simple intro page, and login with option to register). Not any content at all.
And we also also want to use VM registration for registering new users.
I set up the secure access for categories/products using Joomla menu items pointed to virtuemart categories, and set the menu item access to "registered". Worked perfect, user not logged in, don't see anything but splash page. Logged in, all of the product categories were available via the menu items.
But we just realized this messes up user registration. We want to use Virtuemarts user reg so we don't have to gather all of that data (address info, etc.) and come back and enter by hand.
Apparantly, with the virtuemart menu items set to "registered" access, the user gets redirected to joomla's registration page(which doesn't gather the data we need into Virtuemart). I've pasted a valid VM registration url everywhere I could find in the backend login files (com_user and mod_user), but no luck (didn't think that would work, im a beginner).
Anyone know if there is a workaround? Or a better way to do this?
Thank you.

Answer 1

I can you tell with absolute certainty that you'll need to make a minor adjustment in the VM code if you want to do this. The hurdle is that VM uses the same menu Item ID as it's default throughout the script, so even if you create a different menu item for the registration, it's always going to fall back to the first one that you had.
The only way around this is a small hack in the VM function that always forces this to happen. Put the below code at the very beginning of function getShopItemid() located in ps_session.php somewhere around line 459. Leave all the existing code in place, but this needs to run before that does.
/*Hack For multiple VM menu itemids, if there is a page specified, find THAT Itemid */
global $page;
if($_REQUEST['Itemid']) {
$_REQUEST['shopItemid'] = $_REQUEST['Itemid'];
} elseif($page) {
$db_hack = new ps_DB;
$q = "SELECT id FROM #__menu WHERE link='index.php?option=com_virtuemart' AND published=1 AND params like '%page=".$page."%'";
$db_hack->query( $q );
if( $db_hack->next_record() ) {
$_REQUEST['shopItemid'] = $db_hack->f("id");
}
}
Once this is in place, you'll need to have a Joomla menu item that includes at least this:
option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.registration
With that menu item in the database, the above code will find the menu item for that page, and use that one instead of the default VM method. The Joomla security will trigger as you expect because it has the correct menu item.