Magento 1.4 Widgets ... in Joomla!?
Tuesday, 02 March 2010Magento 1.4 is there and one of it's main features is going to be widgets. But what about MageBridge? How do widgets fit into Joomla!? There are already some nice blogs on the subject of widgets, so if you don't know what widgets are, first take a look at one of the following pages:
- www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/screencast-introducing-magento-widgets-by-roman-zenner/
- www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/introducing-magento-widgets/
- blog.baobaz.com/en/blog/magento-widgets
Revolution in Magento
Now, widgets are revolutionary in Magento - they add some very good CMS-features to Magento that were missing for a long time. But, as makers of MageBridge, we can safely say there's still a huge demand for full CMS-integrations like the LazzyMonks Wordpress integration, TypoGento or MageBridge. If you have a webshop which only needs a couple of CMS-pages, surely all these CMS-integrations are overkill. But if e-commerce is only part of your business, your website could be greatly enhanced by using Joomla! with MageBridge instead.
CMS markup
So how do widgets fit into MageBridge? To explain this a bit more thorough, let's take a look at the underlying architecture of widgets. Before Magento 1.4, you could add CMS Markup to your content and this CMS Markup would be dynamically replaced with something else when loading the page.
For instance a tag like the following could be included in the CMS-page:
{{block type="catalog/product_new" template="catalog/product/new.phtml"}}
This would be translated to a complete HTML-block with the latest products. Now with MageBridge, it is possible to add the same CMS Markup to your Joomla! content and thus add any Magento block to any Joomla! content. This functionality of the so-called MageBridge Content Plugin is very very powerful - though only a very small part of the whole MageBridge integration, it's surely one of the more important features.
The widgets tag
Now, Magento widgets make use of the exact same markup, except that all widgets are defined through the CMS Markup Tag "{{widget}}". The following would show some kind of static block with ID 5:
{{widget type="cms/widget_block" template="cms/widget/static_block/default.phtml" block_id="5"}}
The cool thing here is that MageBridge supports this feature right away, as soon as you upgrade to Magento 1.4. The MageBridge code is already shipped with the logic to switch over to the usage of widgets, as soon as the presence of widgets is detected. (Of course we recommend only to upgrade to Magento 1.4 once it is stable.)
TinyMCE integration
But there's more in Magento 1.4: The application ships with a WYSIWYG-editor (TinyMCE) which allows you to easily insert any widget into a CMS-page. This editor is easy to use for people who lack knowledge of HTML and especially this widget-code. Now, Joomla! is also shipped with the TinyMCE-editor, so the thought comes to mind to bring the same widget-in-WYSIWYG feature to Joomla!.
Many thanks to Varien!
Actually, adding a Magento plugin-of-some-kind to either the TinyMCE-editor or the JCE-editor (in Joomla!), was already on the roadmap of MageBridge since version 0.1. But because of the huge amount of work, we never got around actualling creating it. Guess what? Varien did this job instead, so our only job is to integrate everything into Joomla!. Happy new year and many thanks to Varien!