Using Magento themes in Joomla!
Friday, 10 July 2009 Our MageBridge product builds a bridge between Joomla! and Magento, and (more importantly) brings Magento content to Joomla!. This means Magento-blocks are displayed in the component-area or module-areas of a Joomla! template. But just adding the Magento HTML to Joomla! is not enough. A shopping cart or a product-page needs to be styled properly and needs to be integrated in the rest of the Joomla! site.Styling HTML is realized through CSS-definitions. To style the HTML-code of a Magento shopping cart, we could use a default Magento theme because a Magento theme knows the best way to style Magento-based HTML-code. But if you want to modify the Magento theme to fit in with your Joomla! template more nicely, you're facing a challenge. The first and obvious choice would be to change the Magento theme, but this can a daunting task.
Note that what we are talking about here is not building a complete Magento theme, not even modifying a Magento theme. Let's say we only want to change the background-color of a shopping cart. This background-color is modified through a CSS-definition, and within a Magento-theme the CSS-definitions are to be found in the skin-directory. Editing the CSS-files there is not really that hard.
But MageBridge also offers an alternative. Instead of using a CSS-stylesheet from Magento, you could also disable that stylesheet and add all the appropriate CSS-definitions to your Joomla! template instead. When combining a Joomla! template with a Magento theme, this might be even smarter to do looking at the existance of double CSS-defitions and the aspect of performance.
MageBridge offers an easy-to-use interface to modify the behaviour of this bridge, and disabling or enabling CSS-stylesheets of the current Magento-theme is very easy. When purchasing MageBridge you also get access to numerous tutorials that guide you through the process of modifying your Joomla! template or Magento theme to your own needs.