Five more plugins have arrived on the marketplace since our last round-up, four of them free, one putting your products in your customers' living rooms, and the plugin which draws your PDF invoices has been rebuilt on a maintained library. Here is what is new, and what changed under you.
Everything below is on the marketplace.
- A 3D model of your product, and your customer's room
- Several websites from one Joomla
- UK VAT numbers, checked with HMRC
- Your shop in your sitemap
- Econt Express, for the shops delivering in Bulgaria
- PDF invoice 5.0.0, drawn by a maintained library
- Updates to the plugins you already use
3D Model puts a 3D model of your product on the product page. Your customers turn it around with the mouse or a finger, zoom on it, pan it, and on a phone or a tablet they tap "See it in your room" and the product appears in front of them at its real size, in augmented reality, with nothing to install. That last part is what a photograph cannot do: it answers the question a customer asks before buying furniture, an appliance or an instrument, which is whether the thing actually fits.
The model is added in the product's images, next to the photographs, and behaves like one: same place, same drag and drop to order them, same delete. When you add one you are asked to turn it to the side your customers should see first, and that view becomes the product image everywhere your shop shows one. On the product page, hovering its thumbnail shows the model exactly as hovering a photograph shows that photograph.
If you do not own a model, the plugin builds one from the photographs you already have. An "Add a 3D model" button on the product edit page opens a window where you drop photographs, or pick the ones the product already has, and an image to 3D service returns a model a minute or two later. It costs a few cents a model, it picks back up if you close the page, and it stays off until you choose a service and enter the key of your account with it: until then nothing about your products leaves your website.
Nothing is loaded on the pages of the products which have no model, and a model is only downloaded when the customer asks to see it, so the rest of your catalogue is exactly as fast as before. The plugin is free.
Domains serves several websites from a single Joomla, one domain name each. Each one answers under its own name, with its own home page, its own template style, its own menu, its own language and currency, its own site name and the address its emails are sent from, while the content, the extensions, the catalogue and the administration stay in one installation, with one database and one backup. The plugin is free.
It works on any Joomla, with or without a shop. Modules can name the domains they belong to, and content can be given to a domain through a user group and an access level, so what belongs to one website is not shown on another. What you leave public belongs to every domain. Every setting is optional: a domain which only sets a template style changes nothing else, and a domain name which is not in the list is served exactly as it was.
When the website sells, each domain gains the settings which only mean something to a shop: the currency it opens in, whether the cart, the address book and the order history are shared with the other domains or belong to this one, and which products and categories it lists. A customer registering on a domain is recorded as having registered there, and an order keeps the domain it was placed on, so the emails sent afterwards link back to the right website. With HikaMarket, a domain can be given to a vendor, and it becomes their own website: their name, their template, their products, their emails and a checkout which only accepts what they sell.
Everything lives in the settings of the plugin, one line per domain. There is no component to learn and no table of its own, so your domains travel with a backup like any other setting. The per-domain cart, and the products and categories restricted to a domain, need HikaShop 6.6.1 or newer.
Since the United Kingdom left the European Union, VIES only answers for the numbers of the Northern Ireland protocol, the ones starting with XI. A normal GB number cannot be verified there at all, so a British business ordering from your shop was not recognised as a company and did not get the exemption your tax rules give it. UK VAT number check fills that gap: GB numbers go to the official "Check a UK VAT number" API of HMRC, in real time, while your customer fills in their address, and everything else keeps going to VIES as before. The plugin is free.
A number nobody is registered under is refused with a clear message, so your customer corrects it instead of ordering without the exemption they expected. The name and the address HMRC holds for the number are written in the HikaShop log, and if you enter the VAT number of your own business, HMRC returns a consultation number for every check, which is your evidence that you made it. You decide what happens when the check cannot be made at all, if HMRC is down or your credentials expire: accept the number, or refuse it until the service is back.
Registering your application on the Developer Hub of HMRC takes around two weeks to be approved, so it is worth starting before you need it. The plugin needs HikaShop 6.6.0, or a 6.5.2 built on the 26th of August 2026 or later: those are the versions which let a United Kingdom address carry a GB VAT number at all.
OSMap, and the sitemap extensions built on the same plugins, only know about the content Joomla itself manages, so a shop was missing from its own sitemap. Integration with OSMap / XMap teaches them about it: for every HikaShop menu item in your sitemap, it walks the categories under it and lists the products they hold, so search engines are told about your catalogue instead of having to find it by following links. The plugin itself is not new, it is on the marketplace now, and it is free.
It follows your category tree as deep as you want or stops at the depth you set, caps how many products are listed per category for a very large catalogue, lists an item once or once per place it appears in, and sets the priority and the change frequency reported for your product pages. It sends your product images along with the pages, so your catalogue can be picked up by image search. And on a shop served on several domain names with the Domains plugin, each domain gets a sitemap holding the products it actually sells, with its own addresses.
Econt adds Econt Express delivery to your shop. Your customer chooses where the parcel goes on the checkout itself: an Econt office, an Econtomat locker, both picked on a map, or their own address. You create one shipping method per delivery mode you want to offer, each with its own name, its own price and its own restrictions.
From the order page in your backend you create the shipment, download the waybill, follow the parcel and cancel the shipment, without leaving HikaShop.
The library the PDF invoice plugin drew your invoices with, TCPDF, has been declared abandoned by its own author, and the layer above it, html2pdf, has had no update since June 2025 and cannot follow it. Neither will receive another fix, including a security one. So the plugin now draws with tc-lib-pdf, the successor written by the same author, which is maintained and released regularly. That is the whole reason for the major version number.
Your invoice layouts keep working. The plugin reads the layouts written for the old engine and draws them with the new one, so the four layouts we ship, and a copy of one you edited yourself, come out as they did. A layout drawing a barcode, a QR code or a free-hand drawing is the exception: those are not supported yet, and the plugin writes in its log which one it found. Your font setting is kept as well, the faces which no longer exist being replaced by the closest equivalent: the Arabic ones by FreeSerif, and every Chinese, Japanese and Korean one by Unifont, which writes all three and travels inside the PDF, which the old CJK fonts did not. A Factur-X invoice in those languages is now valid where before it depended on the reader having a font pack installed.
Factur-X and PDF/A-3 are produced by the new engine's own mechanism rather than assembled by hand, the XML itself being unchanged, and the download is a little smaller than the previous version despite carrying a complete set of fonts. 5.0.0 requires PHP 8.2 or above. If your server runs an older PHP, stay on 4.1.4, which we keep available and which works exactly as it always has.
4.1.4, the day before, is worth mentioning on its own: it repaired the logo missing from the invoice on the default layout, the "Unauthorized path host" error on an invoice holding an image read from an address rather than from a file, and empty temporary files piling up on your server every time an invoice with an image was generated. And for a French shop, the SIREN or SIRET is now written in the Factur-X and the UBL invoice from your company ID alone, without the "ID issuer code" setting few shops know to look up, a platform refusing an invoice whose seller registration identifier is missing.
The new plugins are the visible part. Behind them, a good number of the plugins you already have installed were updated in the last three weeks, and several of those are worth applying rather than waiting for the next time something breaks. They all come through the one click updater of your Joomla or WordPress site.
Alma 2.1.0 sends Alma what Alma asks every merchant for: the content of the cart with each payment, the products, their reference, quantity, price, categories, page and image, the fees such as gift wrapping, and the delivery chosen on the checkout with its name, its price and its carrier. Alma states that it improves the acceptance of the payment plans. The number of the order goes with it, along with the address of the order in your backend and the one for your customer, so an order is found from both sides, and each change of status is reported, the parcel included once the order reaches the status you set as shipped, the tracking numbers of the HikaShop shipping plugins being found on their own. The plugin now talks to the Alma API directly instead of shipping the Alma PHP client for five calls, which makes the download nine times smaller, and it lost a PHP 8.5 deprecation with it. The whole exchange was checked against the Alma sandbox, and a real order was placed on a test shop.
Stripe Checkout 1.5.1 to 1.5.4 is a run of fixes on the way back from Stripe. 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 repaired the automatic renewal of a subscription never being scheduled: the recurring plan of the order was lost when the payment was confirmed, then came back in a shape the rest of HikaShop does not read, so the card saved during the first payment was never charged again. 1.5.3 repaired the error page a customer landed on after confirming a payment with 3-D Secure, where the payment had gone through and the order was confirmed but the customer saw an error and could believe their order had failed. 1.5.4 sends the customer back to the end of the checkout on the menu item the checkout was on, instead of leaving Joomla to display it on the default menu item of the website, which put the thank you message in the middle of the home page.
Matomo 1.1.2 records a sale inside the visit which produced it in more situations. The sale is sent by your server rather than by the browser of the customer, so without the visitor id, the browser and the language of the buyer, Matomo saw a different visitor: the purchase was recorded as a visit of its own and the cart of the real visit stayed displayed as abandoned. The visitor id is now kept for the whole visit, and read from the cookie of Matomo when its tracking script could not write it, which is what happens when the customer comes back from a payment gateway such as Stripe or PayPal.
Price per category 1.2.0 lets you set a minimum quantity per category next to the maximum, so a double room can require 2 Adults and cannot be booked for a single person at the double-occupancy price per adult. A category left below its minimum is raised to it once the customer books anything, with a short message saying so, and the "Travelers" listing filter takes those minimums and maximums into account, so a search for 1 Adult no longer lists a room requiring 2. 1.2.1 then fixed a booking priced at zero on the cart and the checkout when the price it is built from asks for a minimum quantity of its own.
Recurring orders 1.0.1 fixed the delivery days chosen on the checkout being lost when the checkout refreshed its blocks, which left the order with the recurring discount but with no schedule, a delivery falling on the last day of the advance creation window or on the end date of the schedule being skipped, and the recurring discount being added a second time on the upcoming orders. It also gained a "Delivery day" setting which takes the day from the order date instead of asking the customer for it. And DHL 1.2.5 gave its first setting its name back, where it displayed the word ENVIRONMENT.
You will find all of these on the marketplace. If one of them does something you need but not quite the way you need it, tell us on the forum: most of what is above started as somebody asking.
