Joomla Support, WordPress Support -How To Add Magento eCommerce To A Joomla Site

Monday, 09 March 2009 13:19

How To Add Magento eCommerce To A Joomla Site

Although several e-Commerce solutions are available for Joomla, none of them seem to meet the powerful features of the open source Magento eCommerce Platform.

As a rule of thumb, I would advise you to use a software solution for what it is intended to. Go Joomla if you want to create and maintain a web site with ease, go Magento in case you need a fully fledged webshop. And here is exactly where issues may arise: you might need a shopping cart solution in Joomla or you may need additional content management features in a Magento store. Here is where MageBridge comes in!

MageBridge: a Magento bridge for Joomla

Last Friday I had the pleasure to join Yireo, one of our Extension Development Partner, at a MageBridge Demo and really got impressed by their approach to bridge Magento to Joomla. With MageBridge they offer a powerful and flexible architecture to combine best of both worlds.

MageBridge is a Joomla component that visually integrates Magento in your Joomla site. This allows you to use the Magento backend for managing your webshop and present your catalogue, products and cart or any Magento block in Joomla seamlessly.

Magento for Joomla

All Magento links will read as Joomla links
Loginshare: when logged in in Joomla, you will be logged in in Magento as well
Any seaches in Joomla will also search in Magento products
Seperated databases, Magento and Joomla can be hosted at different geographical locations
Magento’s SEO features are fully integrated
... and much more ...

Why Integrate Magento in Joomla

Magento
+   Magento has very advanced eCommerce features, maintaining product attributes is a breeze
+   Magento integrates with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) through its Application Programming Interface (API)
-/-   Magento is not a Content Management System (CMS)

Joomla
+   Joomla has full CMS capabilities
+   Joomla is both extendable and scalable
-/- Joomla is not a cart

What Do You Get

MageBridge is a commercial suit of Joomla extensions, the license is selling at EUR 195. To allow you to stage both your Magento store and Joomla CMS, the MageBridge license is for 6 domains and includes:

Joomla 1.5 native Component
8 Joomla modules
8 Joomla Plugins
8 MageBridge ‘connectors’, which are extension specific ‘plugins’ or ‘addons’
Documentation, including over 200 tutorials
Forum Support

Powerful Magebridge Specific Extensions

The bundled MageBridge specific extensions turns your Joomla site in a plug-and-play Magento-powered store. The MageBridge Custom Block module allows you to add any Magento block to a Joomla module position. The MageBridge Content Plugin allows you to add any Magento content to any Joomla content through special Magento CMS-tags. MageBridge Connectors ties in Magento to Joomla even further. These connecters have a minimum of code and (as an example) will allow you to:

Change Magento store views in Joomla
Use Customer User Profiles in Magento from JomSocial, Community Builder or the open source Social Engine Anahita
Trigger events in Joomla based on Magento sales, like:
- Add a client to a JomSocial Group
- Add a client to a DOCman Group to allow access to downloads

Additional Options

Yireo offers a complete set of additional solutions to get you up to speed. Some examples:

Vm2Mage: a migration-tool to migrate your webshop from VirtueMart to Magento
RocketTheme template modifications to integrate Magento in your Rockettheme powered Joomla site seamlessly

Conclusion

MageBridge is an ideal tool for webdesigners and developers to setup an open source based eCommerce ‘marketing machine’ and Content Management System.

For experienced Joomla template designers Magento theming may be challenging. And since MageBridge visually integrates Magento theming in a Joomla site, you may run into all sorts of Javascript issues, since Magento’s Javascript library is based on ProtoType, which is not compatible with Joomla’s Mootools library. This can easily be solved by using jQuery, since both ProtoType and Mootools are compatible with jQuery.

MageBridge offers an integrated workaround for Javascript issues by allowing you to enable/disable scripts in the Theme Configuration Setup. Next to that, you may want to just decide to only use jQuery based Joomla modules or templates in combination with Magento/MageBridge.

Although we'll strive for jargon free answers and solutions, a feature rich and therefore complex solution like Magento requires expert skills from our support staff engineers, especially for customization in Magento theming. There might be only be a few "easy answers". Setting up a feature rich eCommerce solution is not for the faint hearted.

MageBridge may help save you a lot of money. When you compare the features of the Magento Enterprise Edition (currently selling at USD 11,125 per year) and the free Magento Community Edition, you'll find out that some Enterprise Edition features (like CMS+ or Category View Permissions) can be achieved by using Joomla and additional Joomla Extensions instead. If you don't need all Enterprise Edition features, it's definetely worth to consider using Joomla, Magento's Community Edition and MageBridge!

Learn More About MageBridge

Visit yireo.com for a complete overview of MageBridge, like

MageBridge Demo: This "defaults" demo-website contains a default Joomla installation and a default Magento installation
Showcase: see what others have achieved with the Joomla-Magento-MageBridge combination
(TIP: visit the official site for the Dutch Joomla Days to see Magebridge at work)

Any Questions Left?

Follow Yireo on Twitter @yireo for news and updates
Submit a Support Request through the Online Helpdesk: we do offer full support for Joomla, MageBridge and Magento

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