Why pay for MageBridge?
Friday, 17 July 2009MageBridges main competitors offer free solutions for integrating Magento with Joomla!. They all offer shared user-credentials and Single Sign On. So why pay for MageBridge when those extensions are availabe for free?
To be straightforward, if you don't want to pay for any software - if you're really that principal, don't. But our opinion is that setting up a website is costing money one way or another, if you take in that time is money. And if it takes much more time to implement such a free extension in your site, then paying for MageBridge could cost you even less in the end. So let's focus in the ease of implementation and the features that both extensions offer.
Introducing MageBridge
So what is MageBridge? MageBridge is a solution built on top of the Joomla! 1.5 Framework to connect Joomla! to other webbased applications. It is also a solution dedicated to Magento - it extends the Magento API and adds extra functionality on top of it, which makes the bridge do more than the Magento API is capable of.
We only focus on bridging Magento and Joomla! - we there for not only concentrate on building the bridge but also pay attention to all the problems that arise with it. Yireo jumps forward as all-round solution provider by offering you not only the software, but also all the tutorials and support needed to make the Joomla!/Magento combination a success.
Ease of use
MageBridge requires you to install an extension in both Magento as Joomla!. The reasons for this are quiet technical, but one of the points is that MageBridge allows for the applications to be installed on separate webservers. This adds to security because the two applications are separated and can be maintainted in their own jail (open_basedir, Virtual Host). Because of this, MageBridge needs to extend the API to allow for multi-lingual configurations and so-called API-widgets, which brings us to another point: Ease of use.
With MageBridge installing and configuring the bridge is easy and to-the-point. Though technical details need to be taken care off, the MageBridge GUI allows you to detect problems and easily fix them.
API-widgets
MageBridge makes us of so-called API-widgets which are improvements on regular Joomla!-forms which make it very easy to configure things. For instance, when creating a Joomla! menu-item pointing to a Magento product, this Magento product can be selected through a modal-box (a Lightbox-effect like used when selecting articles) which shows a listing of products queried directly from Magento. MageBridge focusses on ease-of-use, detailed troubleshooting and flexible configuration. In the end, we believe this is worth paying for, instead of struggling for hours with a too-technical interface. We want to create software that just works.
Setting up the applications
After the installation of MageBridge in both Joomla! as Magento, and once the bridge is running, you don't need any synchronization. With MageBridge we just keep both applications fully in sync as soon as a change is made. If you create an user in Magento, it will be created in Joomla!, and vice versa. There's even no need to disable user-creation forms like with other bridging solutions.
MageBridge does not allow you to sync user-groups. However, when an user is created in Joomla!, a Magento customer-record can also be created automatically and that customer can be dumped in a specific customer-group. MageBridge allows for Joomla! user-groups to be connected to Magento customer-groups, without the danger of loosing access to your backend. Again, configuring this is very easy.
Technical details
MageBridge uses something we call "event forwarding" to allow for Joomla! events to be reused in Magento, and Magento events to be reused in Joomla!. This allows for developers to integrate third party extensions with MageBridge, without them knowing the complex architecture of MageBridge. Building for instance a relation between a Magento product and a Community Builder profile is just as easy as writing a generic Joomla! plugin.
Regarding performance, MageBridge doesn't use a fully loaded Magento-application, but initialize only those parts of the Magento system that are needed. There for the needed resources for wrapping Magento in Joomla! are less than just adding up the resources of both Joomla! and Magento. Given our single HTTP-request-architecture, with MageBridge resources are as low as they can be.
As with any grown-up Joomla! extension, upgrades should be easy through one-click upgrades. As with all upgrades, it's recommended to create a solid backup before you begin. As the Magento development process is sometimes a bit jumpy, it's highly recommended to test the upgrade in a development environment first, before putting it into production.