Presentation of MageBridge at Varien
Wednesday, 29 July 2009Yesterday (July 28th) the team of Yireo was over at the Varien office for an official presentation of MageBridge. Varien - the company behind Magento - has been interested in MageBridge for some time now. Because MageBridge went live a couple of days ago, the Yireo team now had the opportunity to explain the full strategy of MageBridge and give a demo.
About the bridge
There are some features in MageBridge that could be called revolutionary. There are more CMS-bridges for Magento (WordPress, Drupal, Typo3 and even Joomla!) but Yoav Kutner - CTO at Varien - admitted that MageBridge was the first complete bridging solution that actually worked with a neat architecture. But next to that, there are some additional features that are very interesting.
While MageBridge is very easy to use, it also has some technical enhancements which outrun other bridging solutions. The plugin-system for instance (allowing third party developers to easily reuse Magento information in their own Joomla! extensions) is innovative, but also the fact that multiple API-calls are bundled into one single HTTP-request add to the power of MageBridge.
Easy installation
MageBridge is also the first commercial Magento extension that can easily be installed using the MagentoConnect application. This mechanism makes use of the PEAR-packaging standard, used also for free community extensions. Most commercial extensions currently need to be installed manually by unpacking the content of a ZIP-file on the webserver, giving all kinds of problems like unzipping it in the wrong directory or giving the files not enough permissions for the webserver. All these problems are non-existent with MageBridge.
Presentation
During the presentation several crewmembers of Varien where present, including the CEO Roy Rubin and CTO Yoav Kutner. First off, Jisse Reitsma (lead developer of MageBridge) gave an overview of the features of MageBridge and also explained a bit more on the technical details behind the architecture. Next, Ray Bogman (managing director of Yireo) gave a presentation on the usage and configuration of MageBridge. During this demo, mostly the easy-to-use GUI-elements were presented, but also the solid archictecture underneath came clear.
Because this was one of the first in-to-depth experiences of Varien with the Joomla! CMS, the next day Ray Bogman also gave Yoav Kutner a quick-start on the technical aspects of Joomla! 1.5 during an two-hours meetup. Even though Varien is planning on implementing more CMS-features into Magento, they realize that integrating a full-blown CMS like Joomla! into Magento also serves a great purpose and fullfills the needs of many people.
We (the Yireo team) are glad that the Magento-people are as enthousiastic about the MageBridge-product as we are. It opens up for many opportunities for both the Magento community as the Joomla! community. We would also like to thank the Magento team for giving us the chance to promote our project.