Details Emerge of the Pending Magento and Joomla! Integration
More details are now emerging about MageBridge, integrating Magento and the Joomla! CMS platform.
In July 2009, Yireo (www.yireo.com) will launch MageBridge - a solution to use the Magento e-commerce system within Joomla!. The integration not only offers cross-site user authentication but brings the complete Magento-webshop to the Joomla! component area. A set of extensions (both Magento extensions as well Joomla! extensions) connect the two applications together in a way that is never seen before, a great way to extend Magento with the most popular open source Content Management System!
Until now the only real e-commerce solution for Joomla! was VirtueMart, which is working fine in many cases but lacks in flexibility and features. Magento not only includes all the features of VirtueMart, but much much more. With the MageBridge-solution this power is finally brought to the Joomla! platform, offering you a solid alternative to VirtueMart.
The main webshop interface is used as a Joomla! component, while there are also modules displaying menu’s, the latest products, a random product or just a plain Magento-block. Also, Joomla! plugins are used for authentication, user synchronization and searching the Magento product-catalog. MageBridge is therefore much more than just a wrapper-solution, but a complete integration of Magento inside Joomla!.
MageBridge is designed to be very easy to use. MageBridge picks up the Magento theme (which still needs to be configured) and drops it into Joomla!, which for instance enables you to move a Magento-block (or a Joomla! module) with a few mouse-clicks. Also the MageBridge backend is filled with easy-to-use features like one-click-upgrades, dropdown-boxes filled with values fetched from the other side of the bridge and troubleshooters.
Besides the bridge between Joomla! and Magento, Yireo will launch many tutorials on how to use Joomla!, Magento and MageBridge itself. Whether you like to watch video tutorials or you need code-samples to help you along, Yireo will be your primary resource for combining Joomla! and Magento. MageBridge will be presented to the the community on the Joomladays in The Netherlands on June 12th by developer Jisse Reitsma.
