Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

Use MageBridge for efficiency

Most people see MageBridge as only a bridge between Joomla! and Magento. This means that MageBridge only becomes valuable if you want to have a complete CMS with your favorite e-commerce application. But MageBridge is much more efficient in various tasks. Let's take a look how much time you can save by using MageBridge.

Creating a new menu-link

Within Magento you can only add a new menu-link by adding a new XML-tag to the right XML-layout file. This not only requires knowledge but also time. With MageBridge, you can just take advantage of the Joomla! Menu Manager to do this.

Adding new blocks to your page

Joomla! also offers the possibility to add "modules" to your website easily through the Module Manager. MageBridge extends this functionality by adding a MageBridge module that allows you to choose a specific Magento block, and add it with a few clicks to your page.

This sounds very easy, but as soon as you want customization, Joomla! lacks the flexibility to determine on which shopping page a specific module should appear. MageBridge offers you lots of tutorials and PHP-classes to accomplish this task, but for the beginner this might be too hard. Still, the Magento alternative is to play around with XML-layouts and page handles, which is much tougher than adding simple PHP-code to your Joomla! template.

Again, by looking at how you can deal with Magento blocks by using MageBridge, this saves a lot of time when building up an initial MageBridge site, but also when the customer wants to switch marketing strategy at some point.

MageBridge is a time-saver

Looking at these comparisons, we can safely say that MageBridge allows you to save up time if you want to use Magento. True, choosing for another e-commerce application like VirtueMart might even save you more time, but only if you want a simple small site that requires little modification.