What do I need to get a MageBridge webshop?
Monday, 07 March 2011Setting up a MageBridge shop sounds cool and easy, but there's lot more to do with it: You need to properly plan a lot of things and this might be overwhelming. For those used to Joomla! sitebuilding, Magento adds a lot of extra complexity. But if you take up the Magento building process as if it was Joomla!, you're bound to end up with a lot of frustration (and extra costs). So let's focus what is needed to get MageBridge going.
MageBridge core
First of all you will need to get the MageBridge core. You can either use our free MageBridge Trial or our MageBridge core packages for this. Experienced developers might also consider free access to Subversion, which excludes support and updates, excludes the ease of using pre-packaged archives, but gives a good start if you know what to look for. You will need to setup MageBridge in both Joomla! as Magento and configure the MageBridge API to get the bridge up and running.
... plus stuff
On top of the bridge, there is some stuff you might to consider as well: MageBridge offers various ways to integrate Magento logic with Joomla! extensions. Any Magento extension might also be integrated within your Joomla!-based Magento shop. MageBridge also offers various template-patches for famuous Joomla! templating clubs like RocketTheme, YOOtheme and JoomlArt.
Good hosting environment
Ever heard about Magento being slow? Perhaps that's true, but if you invest enough in a proper hosting environment, you will notice Magento can be actually really fast. Shared hosting environments that provide good support for a fast Magento shop are very rare. A better choices might be a dedicated server or a VPS. But buying the hardware is not good enough: If you buy 4Gb of RAM but don't configure PHP, Apache and MySQL to actually use it, the investment is worthless. So besides a server, you also need an optimized hosting configuration.
At least one developer
You might consider yourself a developer, but in the Magento world the requirements are a lot higher than with Joomla!. A developer should be fluent in HTML, CSS but also PHP and XML-code. A developer should have no problems with Joomla! templating concepts like output overrides, module chromes and framework calls. But knowledge of Magento theming is also a must: XML layout overrides, PHTML-changes, class overrides, event listeners, they are all skills that your developer should have. Obviously PHP design patters like singletons, MVC and observer/observable should be common knowledge.
Hmm, that's quite more than I expected
A lot of Joomla! developers (that don't have programming skills) dive into Magento at this moment - simply because it is the hottest e-commerce package of this moment. But beware: Magento is far more flexible than any open source e-commerce software that has ever hit the market, but with greater flexibility comes greater complexity. You will need a professional to drive this baby.