Yireo migration (1): Product pages
Monday, 27 September 2010While developing a new Yireo site, one of the challenges were posed by our product pages. In a regular webshop, the Magento catalog-pages would fit perfectly because they allow for flexibility and easy insertion of new products. But in our case, we have both commercial extensions (sold as Magento products) as well as free extensions - so we were looking for a way to create uniform pages. Perhaps you find it usefull what we thought ourselves.
Creating landing pages instead
One of the main concepts was the concept of landing pages. In the old situation, MageBridge for instance was sold as an extension, while actually it includes an entire technology and a new way of building webshops. With a product page, the main goal would be sell that product. But with a landing page, the main goal would be to give information, while sales is only a secondary goal.
By introducing the concept of custom landing pages, we immediately felt we would be much more flexible than before. Landing pages could not only be used for products, but also for an overview of products, or our tutorial-page. But building a landing page in Magento would be a pain in the ass. We wanted to replace it with Joomla! functionality instead.
Replacing Magento product-pages with custom pages
Getting rid of the Magento catalog-pages is not as easy as it seems. While you can just place an Add to Cart button on any page (either in plain HTML or by using a Magento block), the real challenge was to prevent Magento from returning the original product URLs. For instance, on the cart-page every cart-item contains a link back to the product-page. But if we would use our own custom page, this would lead to duplicate pages.
The solution was evident: We need something in MageBridge to turn Magento product-pages into Joomla! custom pages. Or, defining it even broader, turning any Magento URL into any custom URL. This concept called URL Replacement will be introduced in one of the upcoming builds of MageBridge, and actually it is the key to integrate MageBridge with popular Joomla! CCKs like K2, FLEXIcontent and Zoo.