Free trial for MageBridge
Wednesday, 23 February 2011MageBridge allows you to connect a free easy CMS (Joomla!) with a much more complicated e-commerce platform (Magento) and this makes MageBridge a bit more complex than your average e-commerce solution: However, the power our MageBridge solution adds to Magento is overwhelming, and now we offer you a free trial so you can see for yourself.
Free trial - full functionality, limited time
The MageBridge extensions are forming together a platform which allows you to combine Magento and Joomla! in various ways - users are synced, blocks are integrated visually, product sales leads to extra marketing actions. To accompish all this, a lot of different MageBridge extensions are used. And to initially install these MageBridge extensions in your Joomla! and Magento site, we have created MageBridge installer-extensions (for both Joomla! as Magento) to install everything for you. (See our online installation guide for more details.)
Instead of typing a purchased license-key, you can now just enter the license key TRIAL (in capital) to upgrade the installer-extension to a full version: This trial-version includes all (!) the functionality of the real MageBridge version, except that it is encrypted and limited to an usage of 1 month only. Once you decide to purchase a full license, you can easily upgrade from the trial to the paid version.
... but closed source?
The only downside of this trial-version is that it is closed source: To protect our intellectual property, we have encrypted all PHP-files of the trial-version using ionCube. This brings up the requirement to have ionCube installed. While we dislike the entire concept of ionCube, we have decided to make this move simply because our investment in MageBridge has become to big.
The question of course rises: Is MageBridge still open source? Yes, it is. First of all, all paying customers get full access to the open source code. But also, we still comply fully to the GNU/GPL by allowing Subversion-access to our source-code. It doesn't mean the extensions can be used for free, it means that any programmer with knowledge is able to learn from what we have done: Free as in free speech, not free beer.
Coming up next
Now that MageBridge is available in a trial, we are thinking of many other ways to show MageBridge in full action without the need for you to purchase right away. One of the ideas is to create our own TurnKey Linux image, which allows you to run a full-blown MageBridge environment (preconfigured and up & running) within a virtual machine. We keep you updated.