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

Build your own Joomla! membership site

There are many Joomla! extensions out there that allow you to restrict access to content - for instance, DOCman allows for setting permissions on specific downloads or download-categories, and other tools like NoixACL handle permissions to all Joomla! content. But what if you want to allow this access only if people pay for it? MageBridge gives you a flexible solution.

Selling content restriction

The whole principle of restricting content is handled by various Joomla! extensions. But the question is: Under which circumstance should a customer be added? As soon as the customer registers? Or only if a customer pays a certain fee or purchases a certain product? For the last case, MageBridge offers a clean and solid solution.

MageBridge Product Connectors

With MageBridge, you can integrate Magento into Joomla! and there for sell Magento products through your Joomla! site. MageBridge makes this possible. But with MageBridge some technical stuff is also added - as soon as something happens in Magento, a so-called system event is generated and MageBridge just forwards this event to Joomla! (this is what we call: event forwarding).

Now, in Joomla! this gives you the possibility to do something when a Magento product is being sold. This functionality is made available through MageBridge Product Connectors. For instance, the customer that purchased the product could be awarded with JomSocial Karma Points, but you can also add that customer to a specific DOCman group or give that user specific privileges to view specific content.

Memberships with MageBridge

In short: You can sell a Magento product and give an user specific Joomla! access because of that. That's the whole principle of a membership. There's only one problem: A membership is a lot of times limited to a certain period - the membership should expire after a while.

But with DOCman or NoixACL the customer is added to indefinitely, there's no expiration. And because MageBridge is a bridge, and not a membership tool, something is missing. We are still thinking about create some kind of Magento extension that offers Magento memberships, and can be connected to MageBridge to undo the connector action - basically remove the customer again from the DOCman group. But this is something which is not there yet.

Instead, if you choose for an existing membership tool and combine it with MageBridge, you use the membership-functionality of that extension while selling the membership through MageBridge. A good example of such an extension is OSE Membership Control, which handled memberships but does not handle payments.

Cost-effective

MageBridge is a commercial product, so the question is if you could accomplish the same with other free extensions. While there are some free extensions out there, most extensions that offer membership-extension plus a payment-option are only commercially available. You have to do the comparison and math to calculate which option is the best for you.

But one tricky thing here is that one MageBridge license gives you the ability to setup various domains. This antipicates the multi-site functionality that Magento offers, but gives you also the option to reuse the MageBridge license for various purposes: Within Magento, you can setup one store for memberships and connect that with one Joomla! membership-site. But within that same Magento instance, you can add a second store with regular produts and connect that with a second Joomla! site serving as simple webshop.

With each MageBridge license you can setup 6 domains. Our reason to include support for 6 domains, is to have 1 domain for Magento, 1 domain for Joomla! and then use this combination in production, testing and development (2 x 3 = 6). But there's no obligation to follow this licensing scheme. You could easily use one single MageBridge license for one Magento instance plus 5 different Joomla! shops. Just an idea.