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MageBridge is enterprise

With MageBridge we have targeted at flexibility, and because connecting Joomla! and Magento brings up so many possibilities, we have not thought of all possibilities yet. Once in a while we bump into new features, that are actually part of Magento Enterprise Edition, but can be rebuilt using MageBridge without extra costs. Let's see some of these features.

Private sales

Within Magento Enterprise, the concept of Private Sales allows you to bind a specific Magento Store (or Store View) to a specific Magento Customer Group. Because MageBridge only bridges Magento to Joomla!, and actually does not interfer with Customer Groups, it seemed hard in the beginning to create such a thing as Private Sales in MageBridge.

However, MageBridge uses a different technology to determine which Magento Store should be loaded. By configuring a MageBridge Store Connector in Joomla!, you can use this technology to load a specific Magento Store View for a specific Nooku or JoomFish language - this is how multi-linguality is bridged.

But the same technology can also be applied to bind a specific Joomla! usergroup to a specific Magento Store. It boils down to the very same thing as Private Sales in Magento Enterprise - except that this functionality is included with every MageBridge license (so it's a lot cheaper).

Customer rewards

Another cool thing is that MageBridge also offers so-called Product Connectors. If a customer purchases a product in Magento, you can react on that in Joomla! - for instance give the equivalent Joomla!-user extra user points using the JomSocial extension. By doing this, you can reward a customer, or perhaps also add the customer to specific Joomla! usergroups so that specific functionality becomes available (ACLs).

All very cool, but one thing is still missing in this picture: Use the JomSocial user points to get a discount on a specific Magento product. We have still not figured out what would be the best approach to take here. Anyways, there are already various Magento extensions providing this functionality, so it's probably not needed in MageBridge.

Full page caching

Last but certainly not least, Magento Enterprise includes the feature of full page caching which speeds up every catalog-pages considerably - mainly because the Magento application itself does not need to be started on these pages. Caching is good.

MageBridge already included all the API-hooks to enable caching as well, but never got around to implementing it. These weeks however we were e busy with finalizing this new functionality. MageBridge integrates various parts of Magento on a Joomla! page (blocks, headers, breadcrumbs) - for every part that is fetched from Magento, MageBridge 1.5 is now able to cache that part within Joomla!.

So if you cache all parts, there's no need for MageBridge to go to Magento anymore - this would probably be even faster than Magento Enterprise caching. Of course, we first have to prove it works

Supporting Magento Enterprise

Besides the very cool features mentioned in this blog, we fully support the use of Magento Enterprise Edition in combination with MageBridge and Joomla!. You can choose.