MageBridge and the Magento enterprise edition
Tuesday, 06 October 2009We have been asked several times if MageBridge will work with the Magento Enterprise Edition. Currently we have only developed it for the Community Edition. However, because the Magento Enterprise Edition is technically equal to the free version plus some extra modules, it is most likely MageBridge will run with no problems under the enterprise version.
What is the Magento Enterprise Edition?
The Magento application is built by the company Varien and was made publicly available by using the open-source license Open Source License (OSL). While using open-source without support is fine for small websites, the enterprise market became interested as well in Magento but was in need for official support from Varien. The Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) gave them just that.
But besides the support, Magento EE is also shipped with some extra features interesting for the enterprise market. For instance, when setting up the autumn-catalog you can just use a separate Magento store which is not available to the public. When autumn arrives, you use Content Staging to copy all the contents from the development-store to the production-store.
Vouchers, private sales, technical stuff
Magento EE also offers the ability to add vouchers to your products. There are already third-party modules available through MagentoConnect, but this EE-module integrates much better with the whole. Another feature is Private Sales - which allows to open up a specific store or part of the catalog to a specific customer-group. Till now, customer-groups were not really put to use in Magento.
On the technical level there are some improvements as well. Various improvements on security have been made (ACLs, encryption techniques) and Magento EE also allows for much more advanced logging capabilities.
What about MageBridge?
Having discussed the features of Magento EE, the real question is: Which feature will be support by MageBridge? We have not tested this yet, but we expect that MageBridge will have no problem running together with Magento EE. However, by combining Joomla! with Magento there are some interesting setups that could change the regular usage of EE-modules.
For instance content staging: Because you can configure a certain "website" (part of one Magento multi-site installation) within Joomla!, you could configure "website A" for production while building up a new catalog within "website B". Once you're done, you just reconfigure the MageBridge settings in Joomla! to point to the new website and everything is switched over. Of course there is still a good usage for content staging, as it is able to copy all the content from one website to another - you'll still need Magento EE for that.
Another improvement that could be made to the MageBridge setup, would be the integration between the Magento EE permissions and Joomla!. Unfortunately, Joomla! 1.5 has still limited ACL-functionality but with Joomla! 1.6 coming up this all sounds very interesting.