Replacing Magento Downloadable Products with DOCman
Tuesday, 22 June 2010Magento offers the ability to sell downloads, but there are some shortcomings with this functionality. With MageBridge and its connector-architecture, you can replace this Magento functionality with DOCman instead. Here's why and how.
Why replace Magento Downloadable Products?
If you want to sell downloads in your shop, the Magento product-type Downloadable Product gives you this option and it's quite powerful for this. But there are some shortcomings with this type. To begin with, there's no tool to manage the actual downloads - the files people download, version management, hits. For each download, you have to open the corresponding Downloadable Product which is time-consuming.
But there's more: If a customer buys a Downloadable Product, Magento creates a new purchase-record linking that customer to that download. But if the Downloadable Product, the purchase-record is not updated with the new download-details - it stays linked to the old download-link. Also, if you add - after the customer has purchased the product - new downloads to the Downloadable Product, the customer still only gets the original, and not the new downloads.
Meet MageBridge
Now, what we actually want is to give a customer access to a certain resource, while we want to use other tools to manage that resource. A customer buys access to a resource, and wheather that resource contains one download or 1000, it shouldn't matter. MageBridge can give you that functionality - it integrates Magento into Joomla! and gives you all the tricks that come from that integration.
For instance, when a customer buys a product in the MageBridge shop, MageBridge also sends a signal to Joomla!. The result of that signal could be that the customer is added to a DOCman Group, and there for gains access to a bunch of downloads.
DOCman product connector
This functionality is compiled into a thing called the MageBridge DOCman Product Connector. It's a mouthfull, but the right name: MageBridge uses connectors to make it easier to do MageBridge-oriented stuff in Joomla!. There are three types of connectors: Store, product and profile.
Store Connectors allow you to choose which Magento store should be opened in Joomla! - it is used by multi-lingual solutions. Profile Connectors synchronize the user profiles of Community Builder, JomSocial and in the near future Anahita, with the Magento customer profile. And Product Connectors add something in Joomla! when a Magento product is being sold.
The DOCman Product Connector is shipped in the MageBridge core. All you need to do is install DOCman, activate the connector and configure the relation between a Magento product and a DOCman Group. It's easy and efficient.
The future of Product Connectors
Product Connectors allow you to add customers to for instance a DOCman Group, but also assign JomSocial User Points or add a customer to a Joomla! ACL resource. It's very cool but some things are missing. For instance, when the Magento order is cancelled, the actual product action in Joomla! needs to be undone.
Magento is also missing membership-features, meaning that a product can expire after some time. Yireo has already such a membership-feature in place and is hoping to bring this to the public in the upcoming months.
Once this membership-functionality is there in Magento, MageBridge can pick this up and make sure that customers only get access to Joomla! resources for a limited time.You can add customers to specific DOCman resources, but for only a month or a year, without DOCman needing to know about it. Stay tuned!