OpenCart with Journal2 and MultiMerch Marketplace

While being one of the most popular and feature-rich custom themes for OpenCart, Journal2 by Digital Atelier is also known to have compatibility issues with MultiMerch out of the box. Lately, we've cooperated with Digital Atelier to create a MultiMerch integration package for Journal2 that makes it easier.

This guide briefly covers a complete installation of OpenCart, MultiMerch and Journal, so if you're only looking for the Journal2 integration package, click here to go to the relevant section. Please note that this is only applicable for the Journal2 theme for OpenCart2.

Installing OpenCart with vQmod

There's a lot of different OpenCart installation tutorials that cover the installation in detail, so we'll only outline the main steps you need to perform to install OpenCart on your server:

Download the latest version of OpenCart from the official OpenCart website.
Unpack the archive and upload the contents of the upload/ folder from the archive to your server.
Visit your server to run OpenCart's installation script and follow the installation procedure.
Download the latest version of vQmod for OpenCart from vQmod's repository on GitHub. Make sure you download vQmod for OpenCart, not vQmod Standalone.
Unpack the archive, upload the contents of the vQmod archive to your server and run vQmod's installation script by visiting the /vqmod/install/ link in your browser. Make sure index.php files and the vqmod/ folder are writable.

That will get you a clean installation of the latest OpenCart version with vQmod enabled.

Installing Journal2

Journal2 is a premium OpenCart theme so you'll need to purchase it from ThemeForest first. When you have the theme purchased, please see the official Journal Documentation for the installation procedure.

Once you've finished installing Journal2, you'll have a clean OpenCart store running the Journal2 template.

Installing MultiMerch with Journal2 integration files

When you have OpenCart with Journal running smoothly, proceed to installing MultiMerch for OpenCart. Our documentation covers the installation process in detail, so we'll only outline the steps required to install MultiMerch:

Download the latest version of MultiMerch from either GitHub, OpenCart Marketplace or MultiMerch website. If you have purchased MultiMerch Complete Package, download the latest version of the archive from your account.
Unpack the archive, rename/copy the default template folder to your theme's folder name and upload the contents of the multimerch_marketplace/upload/ folder from the archive to your server. For the Complete Package, also do this for every addon you want to install.
Enable your theme in vQmod's vqmod/pathReplaces.php file.
Download the latest version of MultiMerch-Journal2 integration file from GitHub. Please note that it's version-specific, so we'll be trying to keep it up to date with the latest versions of Multimerch and Journal2.
Unpack the archive and upload the contents of the upload/ folder to your OpenCart installation folder. Warning: this will overwrite two of MultiMerch's original vQmod files inside the xml/ folder (multimerch_core_productpage.xml and multimerch_core_sellermenu.xml), so make sure to make a backup of them! This also means you'll need to merge those two files manually if you have made any modifications to those files.
Install MultiMerch via Admin > Extensions > Modules > [Install].

That's it. When this is done, you should be able to see MultiMerch-specific seller information throughout your store, including:

Seller profile on the product page
Seller navigation menu on top of the page and in the account sidebar (if you have them enabled)
Link to the seller registration form on the login page
Various MultiMerch pages being styled properly

Here are some of the screenshots showing OpenCart2 with Journal2 theme and MultiMerch installed and working correctly: