More than just a bridge
Monday, 31 August 2009MageBridge has been released already a month ago and so far, we've had a lot of compliments of happy customers. But instead of being just a bridge, we see MageBridge as a whole set of solutions. Event forwarding, tutorials, technical enhancements never seen before with extensions - we give you an overview.
MageBridge and event forwarding
Event forwarding is kind of a technical thing, but to put it in layman's terms: Every time when you do something in one application (either Joomla! or Magento) something else can happen in the other application. MageBridge makes use of this already a lot: Every time you create an user or change the user details on one side, the changes are replicated to the other side. Also the authentication mechanism is part of this.
But while the core takes care of the most important stuff, this architecture also allows third party extensions to make use of event forwarding as well. That's why this feature in this blog: MageBridge not only offers a bridge as it is, but offers a clean way for third party developers to extend the bridge-functionality as well.
Practical examples
Some examples: Say you want to sell access to a DocMan document. So if somebody wants to download a document X, they need to buy product Y first within Magento. That's possible by writing an extra MageBridge plugin using the regular plugin-architecture of Joomla!. Another example would be to sell products that make a customer member of somekind of Community Builder membership.
But other options are out there: You could use a Joomla! plugin to add the Lightbox-effect to a Magento product. You could write Joomla! Content Plugins to parse the output of Magento blocks. You could connect a Community Builder profile to somebody's Magento account.
Yireo Tutorial Club
Because there are so many options available, but a lot of these options require a deep understanding of Magento and Joomla!. So we had the feeling we had to do more than just creating a bunch of tutorials: We needed to create lots of tutorials. While most MageBridge-related tutorials will be available for MageBridge-customers, other tutorials on Joomla! and Magento will become available under the Yireo Tutorial Club.
We intend to release weekly new tutorials on administration, theming and development within Joomla! and Magento. While our MageBridge product serves a specific purpose, there is still a great demand for in-to-depth tutorials that dive into the development of Joomla! and Magento websites. The Yireo Tutorial Club will fill that gap.
The Yireo site
While setting up the Yireo website, we used MageBridge to connect Joomla! and Magento. We also used JFusion to connect Joomla! with phpBB. But in the end, we needed customers to gain access to certain types of memberships within Joomla!. As Joomla! 1.5 does not include many options for configuring custom ACLs, we jumped to a third party extension called Open Source Excellence MSC (in short: MSC).
MSC did the job, but we still needed to connect a customer automatically to the right MSC-group after purchasing the right product in Magento. MageBridge to the rescue - we wrote a custom plugin that allowed us to configure a relation between a Magento SKU and a MSC membership-ID. Because the functionality was not that complex, it proved the point that MageBridge could indeed be connected to other applications easily.
Magento memberships
Selling software and memberships through Magento posed another problem. We needed some kind of "Virtual Product" that had a start-date and an end-date. Instead of messing around with attributes, we decided to create a new product-type "Membership Product". While this product-type is still far from finished, we are seriously thinking about releasing this module to the public.
As our MageBridge product included some kind of membership, but also the principle of licensing and downloads, we extended the functionality of "Membership Product" into a second new product-type "Software Product". This type is probably more custom for our purpose and is offering more-or-less the same functionality as a "Downloadable Product", it perhaps could also lead to a public release.
However, one thing that isn't tackled by this membership-setup is the issue of re-occuring payments. Many have asked in the Magento forums about memberships, but what they ment is a thing called re-occurring payments without the customer needing to interfere. This is something we see as the responsibility of Magento to deal with (or not). In fact, it's not even up to Magento, but up to payment providers to provide a solid architecture for this.
Concluding
In the end, bringing MageBridge with its unique set of features on the market is perhaps worth mentioning. But also the whole set of solutions around it, deserves attention. That's why we say to you: We bring you Yireo!