Make Virtuemart use User Groups instead of Shopper Groups

Question

By default, Virtuemart uses its internal shopper groups for doing things like assigning prices and restricting access to certain products.

The problem with this is that ONLY Virtuemart uses its own shopper groups, so if you have other extensions like RSMembership which change the normal Joomla user group of a user, Virtuemart has no idea.

So if someone buys a subscription in RSMembership, and you drop that user into a "Premium" usergroup, and you want Virtuemart to give them a price discount for being in that "Premium" user group, it doesn't appear to be possible since Virtuemart uses its own shopper groups, not the normal Joomla user group.

Is there a solution to this problem or some setting/modification to Virtuemart that makes it utilize the Joomla user groups, rather than its shopper groups?

Answer 1

Yes, there's a Joomla extension called Chameleon that allows you to trigger different shopper groups based on Joomla user groups. JED: http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/chameleon

You can set up a rule that says ‘Is user in "Premium" user group? If so, put them into "Premium" shopper group’, then set up another similar rule per group.

In this way, RSMembership or other user group components are able to control shopper groups.

The shopper group assignments are done on-the-fly. i.e. they are not added to the user's record in Joomla/VM, but VM treats the user as being in that shopper group, and does pricing/visibility etc accordingly.

Disclosure: I'm the developer of Chameleon.