Joomla! e-commerce at its best
Tuesday, 23 March 2010As soon as Joomla! (or Mambo back then) became popular as CMS, the demand for an e-commerce solution also grew. Various opensource e-commerce packages were around, but VirtueMart became the big winner because it offered a full integration with Joomla!. Now that Magento becomes much more popular, we feel MageBridge can lift Joomla! to a more professional level when it comes to e-commerce.
History of Joomla! shops
VirtueMart started off as a fork of phpShop - a stand-alone e-commerce solution - and it integrated itself within Joomla! as component plus various modules and plugins. But because the features of VirtueMart were limited, many choose for a stand-alone osCommerce application instead. While there were various efforts to integrate osCommerce into Joomla!, a full integration was never reached. There for VirtueMart became the most popular webshop for Joomla!.
Nowadays e-commerce becomes a business much more serious than before. It's now really about money, and many shop-owners rely for their income on a solid webshop. The demand for features was growing rapidly, but basically VirtueMart and osCommerce have trouble keeping up. This is the simple reason why Magento was started, and it's the same reason why Magento is nowadays the most popular e-commerce system out there.
The shop-owner in control
One huge aspect that adds to the success of MageBridge - instead of just Magento alone - is that the powerful e-commerce features of Magento are combined with the great usability of Joomla!. Theming is still complicated: You need to be a good webdeveloper to build a solid Joomla!/Magento theme.
But when the webshop is developed and ready, the shop-owner has no problem managing the site. Menu-items pointing to Magento products can easily be created, Magento blocks (containing lists, ads, marketing campaigns) can be managed as Joomla! modules. Even better: With the new Magento widgets, adding Magento content to Joomla! pages is very very easy.
Great features
We can safely say that all features in VirtueMart are to be found in the Magento/MageBridge combination as well. But there's much more. MageBridge makes full use of the multi-site principles of Magento, it offers very flexible templating without messy code, it looks much more professional, it ships with a JCE-plugin, it integrates Magento fully into Joomla! including search capabilities, multilinguality, user authentication, Single Sign On, membership sales, user credits, and so on.
The only problem we have is that there are so many features, so much documentation, that it takes just some time before you get used to this new revolutionary way of dealing with e-commerce within Joomla!.