Yireo migration (2): Joomla! extensions
Saturday, 09 October 2010In our migration to a new site, we have decided to make a couple of changes in our usage of Joomla! extensions. Before we were using phpBB as our forum-component, now we are switching to NinjaBoard. Regular text-articles and blogs are migrated to FLEXIcontent. And we are replacing Magento Downloadable Products with DOCman. Let's explain why.
From phpBB to NinjaBoard
When we first setup our Yireo site, we were looking for a solid forum-application that could handle a lot of traffic and allowed for enhanced user permissions. phpBB seemed to be the right choice, because Joomla! forum-components were still lacking advanced handling of user groups. But since than, our requirements changed and Joomla! changed.
Our requirements were first set to introduce Yireo Memberships, so that we could offer customers access to hundreds of tutorials in exchange for a small fee. But looking at how popular MageBridge become, we decided to focus more on MageBridge and let go of our membership concept. Instead, all of our tutorials become available for free. Still, we wanted to allow only MageBridge customers to write on a MageBridge Support Forum, but because only MageBridge customers would have vital MageBridge-related questions, this was not so much of a point anymore.
Over the years, we also came to dislike phpBB a bit. Some modifications that were needed, required core hacks (which we never like) and the whole phpBB backend seemed overkill for what we needed. We always liked the conceptual thinking of the guys of NinjaForge and when they released a NinjaBoard forum-component it immediately caught our attention. While at the time of writing it is still not stable, we are happy to take up the challenge to run a production site with it (and perhaps fix bugs along the way). NinjaBoard now allows us to maintain a forum with custom user-levels while still having the flexibility of Joomla! plugins and Joomla! templating. Cool.
Welcome to FLEXIcontent
Another point was that the mass-production of blogs, tutorials and video-tutorials also gave us the need for a CCK. We decided on that pretty soon after we started with Yireo, but at that time CCKs seemed not yet stable enough for the needs we had. I think it will require much more than just simple blog to explain why we choose for FLEXIcontent instead of ZOO or K2, but our main point here is that besides FLEXIcontent there also is FLEXIaccess - an ACL-tool which gave us way to build to our site without the need to wait for Joomla! 1.6.
We also want to change our Magento product-pages into FLEXIcontent pages. Instead of having to struggle with the Magento Admin Panel, we can use FLEXIcontent and Joomla! templating to build dynamic landing pages for each software product we sell through MageBridge (the bridge between Joomla! and Magento). For this to fully work, we will introduce a new feature in MageBridge soon that will allow you to replace Magento URLs with custom Joomla! URLs.
From Magento Downloadable Products to DOCman
One other migration is occurring with the actual Yireo software that customers can purchase. Magento offers the ability to construct Downloadable Products, but there are a few limitations. First of all, when you sell a product with download AAA to a customer, and after that add file BBB to the same product configuration, the customer will only have the right to download AAA not BBB. Also if you change the filename of AAA, the customer will not be able to download anything anymore.
Instead of directly selling files, we wanted to sell access to download locations. What is actually in that download location is not important. For now, we are focussing on offering these downloads through DOCman, but we might as well choose for a solution based on FLEXIaccess instead. The cool thing with MageBridge is that we have already built a way to link every Magento purchase to a specific DOCman group - so everything is already in place with the current MageBridge builds.