Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

The Number One reason why some people dislike Magento^TM is performance. The e-commerce application runs considerably slower than Joomla!^TM - at least when it's put to use without any modifications. But is this right? Is Magento really slow? Or is it just that we don't know how to properly tune Magento?

Building a Joomla!^TM template is possible by just using HTML and CSS. But if you want to make things a bit more fancy (hiding columns, special component-layouts, optimizing CSS), you'll need PHP-code to accomplish this. When using templates from known template-clubs like YooTheme, RocketTheme or JoomlArt, this functionality is offered through frameworks like Gantry or Zen Grid. Let's see what's all that about.

When we started with MageBridge, we had SEO in mind. But our encouter with Joomla!^TM 1.5 SEF was so good, that we only created MageBridge^TM with the core SEF functionality in mind. What we didn't realize was that still a lot of people opt for third party SEF solutions, and that some of these SEF solutions are completely incompatible with the Joomla! core SEF.

Yesterday, Friday 5th of March 2010, a MageBridge Demo Day took place in the Netherlands - an afternoon of discussing how Magento^TM and MageBridge^TM could enrich the Joomla! community by integrating this e-commerce functionality in Joomla!^TM.

If a page can not be found in Joomla!, a 404 error is thrown. This shows up by default as a red warning-box declaring something about contacting the administrator, but offering little help in finding the right page. Joomla! 1.5 has improved the old situation by allowing Joomla!^TM templates contain their own custom 404-page. But still the whole concept of a static 404 page seems outdated. That's why there is Yireo^TM Dynamic404.

Magento 1.4 is there and one of it's main features is going to be widgets. But what about MageBridge^TM? How do widgets fit into Joomla!^TM? There are already some nice blogs on the subject of widgets, so if you don't know what widgets are, first take a look at one of the following pages:

• www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/screencast-introducing-magento-widgets-by-roman-zenner/
• www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/introducing-magento-widgets/
• blog.baobaz.com/en/blog/magento-widgets

We just finished testing our Magento extensions with Magento 1.4, and we are happy to announce that all our extensions run flawlessly with Magento^TM 1.4. We were already supporting MageBridge^TM under Magento 1.4, but now we have updated our entire portfolio.

Ever bother to read the release notes? When upgrading to Magento^TM 1.4 there are numerous new features, but also a new directory-structure when it comes to theming. When building new themes based on the parent/child concept, this is important to know.

If you have a Joomla!^TM site with a shop or some kind of payment mechanism, using SSL is a must. But if you want to use your site for social media as well, which requires a lot of times non-SSL, you'll want your website to automatically redirect to HTTP or HTTPS depending on the page you're on. With our SSL Redirect plugin this is very easy.

Magento 1.4 was released some weeks ago, and despite of some minor bugs, we started using it right away. And we're glad to do this: The Magento^TM 1.4 application runs much smoother than the 1.3 version, both in the frontend as the backend.

Most people see MageBridge as only a bridge between Joomla!^TM and Magento^TM. This means that MageBridge only becomes valuable if you want to have a complete CMS with your favorite e-commerce application. But MageBridge is much more efficient in various tasks. Let's take a look how much time you can save by using MageBridge^TM.

At the end of May 2010, the event J And Beyond takes place - an international Joomla!^TM conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. The event is ment for everybody who's interested in the development of Joomla! and is an excellent chance to meet up with Joomla! core members as well as third party developers.

On the 22nd and 23rd of April 2010, the annual Dutch Joomla!Days take place. Just like last year, the online registration pages for visitors are based on Magento^TM. Special for this year is that the actual frontend will be based on Joomla!^TM and MageBridge. We are proud that our MageBridge^TM software is able to contribute to this Joomla! event.

When upgrade to Magento^TM 1.4 you might get caught with a PHP Fatal Error, especially when you're trying to access the Magento Downloader:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare _pear_call_destructors()

(previously declared in .../pearlib/php/PEAR.php:775) in /usr/share/php/PEAR.php

With the new Magento 1.4 the default theme is slightly modified, and this is giving problems with our RT patches. Our RocketTheme template patches modify the CSS of this Magento Default Theme to make it compatible with your favorite RocketTheme template. We have not tested the patches with Magento^TM 1.4 completely yet, but will provide bugfixes in the next few weeks.

This morning Magento 1.4.0.0 Stable was released. Though we had tested MageBridge together with Magento^TM 1.4 Alpha before, there seems to be a new setting which stops MageBridge^TM from working correctly.

Magento^TM 1.4.0.0 Stable has been released. The new e-commerce version brings a lot of enhancements of the current Magento functionality, but also some cool new features. Let's take a look.

Last night (February 10th in our Dutch timezone) there was a webinar on Magento development, organized by Varien. The meeting was led by Koby Oz, but Anton Makarenko (Magento^TM team) and Roy Ganor (Zend) took the technical presentations on them. Thanks you guys for these great talks. Here's a short reaction on the webinar.

Joomla! 1.6 takes its time, but is still coming. While we actively monitor the SVN development tree to make sure our own Yireo^TM extensions will be compatible with Joomla! 1.6 Stable as soon as it arrives, there were a couple of interesting articles written by the Joomla!^TM developers which we overlooked. Let's take a look at some of the highlights in the new Template Manager and the Redirection component.

We are happy to annouce that we have released MageBridge^TM version 1.3. Actually, for existing customers this release is not so exiting, because all features of 1.3 were already included in the latest builds of 1.2. But we are proud to announce this to the world as well.

We had already released three MageBridge^TM patches for RocketTheme templates before, and due to the huge demand for these modifications we have released two more patches: Infuse and Iridium.

Last month we have been working hard on new tutorials for Yireo. Our site lists already over 100 tutorials, but till now the focus was mainly to help webdevelopers use Yireo^TM extensions (both freeware as commercial tools). Now, tutorials on Joomla!^TM and Magento^TM are added quickly. But there's more news.

Templating with MageBridge^TM is a bit more complicated than usual: You have to deal with module chromes, page assignments and empty blocks. We have made a PHP-class MageBridgeTemplateHelper available which helps you accomplish these tasks using simple and understandable PHP-code.

Checkout the MageBridge Template Helper guide for more information.

Yesterday the first MageBridge^TM bootcamp took place in The Netherlands and it was a success. The day served was ment not only to introduce MageBridge to those who were interested, but also to take a look under the hood of this new MageBridge technology.

Last year, the Dutch MeetMagento day was one of the first Magento events in Europe, and it was a great success. This success is going to repeat itself with the second Meet Magento^TM 2010 which is taking place on the 27th of May 2010 in The Netherlands.