MageBridge Demo Day
Saturday, 06 March 2010Yesterday, Friday 5th of March 2010, a MageBridge Demo Day took place in the Netherlands - an afternoon of discussing how Magento and MageBridge could enrich the Joomla! community by integrating this e-commerce functionality in Joomla!.
Overview of the demo-day
During the demo-day, Jisse Reitsma (lead developer) and Hans Kuijpers (main designer) gave a demonstration of the basic usage of MageBridge: While you need a good understanding of Magento to make MageBridge a success, some daily tasks are much quicker done with MageBridge in Joomla! than in Magento stand-alone. With MageBridge it is possible to create Menu-Items within Joomla! pointing to specific Magento products or category-pages.
Also, you can assign any Magento block to any position within your Joomla! page by using the MageBridge Custom Block module, plus you can combine any Magento content in Joomla! articles by using the MageBridge Content Plugin. Because of all this flexility, any - really any - solution is possible with the MageBridge suite, but it takes good knowledge of Joomla! and Magento to do so.
Complicated things need explanation
The demo-day there for not only served the purpose of explaining what is possible with MageBridge, but also how to do things with MageBridge and how to make the right decisions. Besides showing the administrative tasks, also more advanced techniques like combined theming and event forwarding were explained.
So in the end of the day, the attendees were overloaded with information but also got a good impression of what an investment in MageBridge would bring them.
Next stage?
The problem is that these demo-days will most probably take only place in The Netherlands, while our MageBridge customers are spread-out all over the world. While we will attend various Magento and Joomla! events in Europe, flying to the USA or Australia just to give one afternoon-presentation is a bit too much.
Instead we are strongly thinking about setting up webinars and screencasts. Besides text tutorials placed on our Yireo-site, we have also created some video tutorials on MageBridge. This is part of some experiments which we hope will lead to webinars in the upcoming months. Stay tuned!