Hidden secrets: MageBridge products module
Wednesday, 02 June 2010One of the hidden secrets of MageBridge is it's products module. With VirtueMart there seem to be hundreds of different Joomla! modules to display products in various ways. With MageBridge you only need one, and it's included for free in the MageBridge distribution. Let's see what's under the hood.
Which products to display?
With MageBridge, you get the MageBridge Products module as part of the MageBridge distribution. We maintain it together with the core functionality, so there's no need to install extra third party solutions.
First of all, this module allows you to display a specific list of products somewhere in a sidebar, and you can easily configure which products. You can select a Magento Category, but also the Order in which products are displayed:
- Newest products
- Random products
- Most popular products
How to display the products?
While this is already very powerful, the MageBridge Products module also contains various parameters that allow you to configure which parts of the product should be shown. You can easily choose to display the images, but not the product description. Not the price, but the Add to cart button.
Because of these options there's only a rare chance that you need another module to display your Magento products. Furthermore, if you don't like the HTML, you can always create a Joomla! template override and add your own logic to it.
Menu, listing, slideshow - all in one
But the list goes on: A slideshow or just a simple menu are also options of this swiss-army knife-like Joomla! module. We are even planning to add caroussel to the module in the near future.
The slideshow is based on jQuery, which made it easy for us to include various different Transition Effects. Also included are so-called Easing effects. When the next product is shown (for instead using some kind of Fade-effect), this transition could occur gradually, but it could also happen with some kind of bouncing-effect. Very cool and very easy to configure in the module.
End
The MageBridge Products module is very powerful, and is actually the only products-module you probably need for your MageBridge-based shop. We plan to add more tutorials but demos as well of the endless possibilities of this module. Stay tuned.