Presentation at Byte Internet
Saturday, 18 July 2009Today (friday 17th) Ray Bogman of Yireo went to a partnerseminar of Byte Internet in Amsterdam. During this presentation Ray Bogman gave a demo of the MageBridge extensions, which will be released in the next week or so.
Byte Internet is a Dutch hosting company specializing in Joomla!, but recently also Magento. It should be no surprise that MageBridge fits in nicely with this specialism. Hosting MageBridge is basically nothing more than hosting Joomla! and Magento as two separate applications, but not all hosting environments are tuned and tweaked for running both applications simultaneously. Worse, our experience is that are far too many hosting environments that support for instance Joomla! and some thousand other applications, making the environment very insecure without much performance. It is nice to know that Byte Internet has all the knowledge to run both applications as they should.
MageBridge demo
During his demo, Ray demonstrated the general features of MageBridge. While the visual presentation of Magento inside Joomla! has not changed last weeks, under the hood of MageBridge many things have changed. Joomla! events can now be reused in Magento, and Magento events can be reused in Joomla! - we call this concept "event forwarding". Using event forwarding, third party developers can hook any Joomla! applications to any Magento event by writing a regular Joomla! plugin - it is not necessary for them to know anything of the MageBridge architecture.
Third party integration using event forwarding
To give a solid example for this: On our very own www.yireo.com site, we use a Joomla! component called OSE Membership Control (MSC) which allows for certain content to be only visible to certain members.This is accomplished by assigning the user to one or more membership-groups. While the creators of OSE MSC have integrated their product with VirtueMart, of course we want to use MageBridge instead. Using the concept of event forwarding, MageBridge makes a list of purchased products available in Joomla! using a regular Joomla! event. This event is picked up by a custom "Yireo MSC" plugin which adds the current user to the appropriate OSE MSC membership-group. The actual logic of this plugin needs about 10 lines of code - that's it.
We expect that this kind of third party integration will make MageBridge the most popular e-commerce solution for Joomla!. Now MageBridge is nearing its completion, we also are busy writing detailed tutorials of how to make use of the event-system and write your own MageBridge plugins. We'll keep you posted.