Sell access to DOCman groups
Monday, 29 March 2010Many people were waiting for it, but finally, DOCman 1.5 came out some weeks ago. With this new version, not much changed in the functionality. The major improvement seems to be the complete rewrite of the architecture (Joomla! 1.5 native) and a new groups-system. Now with the latest MageBridge build you can sell access to DOCman user groups. It's very cool.
User groups in DOCman
One of the limitations of Joomla! is usergroups. There are various groups defined (but a prefined set of permissions bound to it) but these groups can not be modified and new groups can not be added. While this will be solved in Joomla! 1.6, DOCman comes with its own solution: DOCman groups.
With DOCman groups you can easily assign a specific user or a set users to have access to a certain set of downloads. It makes it much easier to assign PDF documents to specific groups of people, without having to mess around with permissions of the default Joomla! groups.
Downloadable products ... in Joomla!
Magento already ships with a feature called Downloadable Products, but it lacks some features. For instance, you can't easily maintain a license, a version-number or other information related to the purchased download. Also creating one product for multiple downloads (something like a Grouped Downloadable Product) is currently not possible in Magento.
With the new MageBridge product connector for Joomla!, this changes. You can create a certain Virtual Product within Magento (let's say a product called "PDF Downloads") and as soon as this product is purchased, the MageBridge connector will send Joomla! a signal which will act accordingly: Add the corresponding customer to a DOCman group called "PDF Downloaders".
With this MageBridge-solution you can not only maintain your downloads in a much easier way, you can also sell multiple downloads through a single product. It's a tremendous add-on to Magento, while actually it was a very small trick to play with MageBridge: The connector architecture is already there and ready to use.
DOCman support is available in MageBridge since the major release 1.3.