MageBridge URL Replacements
Tuesday, 18 January 2011A new feature was recently added to MageBridge - something called URL Replacements. And while it does not sound that interesting, it is actually a feature that makes way for many cool things like CCK-integrations, checkout-replacements and simple offline-pages. In short: URL Replacement push MageBridge to the next level.
The basic principle: Replace URLs
With MageBridge, blocks of content are fetched from Magento and pushed into the Joomla! template. These blocks are generated by the Magento theming engine but can be parsed by Joomla! Content Plugins, which makes it possible to apply Joomla! tricks to Magento content. The plugins delivered by MageBridge now add a new feature: They allow certain URLs in the blocks to be replaced with other URLs.
The practical use is that you can replace a specific Magento URL with any other Joomla! URL, and once you start thinking about this, this gives way to many exciting new solutions.
Replacing Magento product-pages with CCK-pages
For any specific Magento page, you can enter an URL Replacement. By adding a new URL Replacement for a specific product, you can replace that Magento product-page with any Joomla! content you want: This could be a landing page (used on Yireo), a specific Joomla! article, but also a CCK-item like existing within K2, FLEXIcontent or ZOO.
The CCK-integration is not complete, because it would still be cooler if you can add CCK-elements that fetch data of a specific product from MageBridge - we are already experimenting with this for K2 and FLEXIcontent. But if you only need an Add-To-Cart link that pushes a Magento product into the Magento shopping cart, you can create this yourself within any CCK.
Replace the Magento checkout
Another application for URL Replacements could be the Magento checkout. If you temporarily want to take the entire shop, this is very simple with MageBridge. But URL Replacements now also allow you to take down just the checkout. You only need to replace the Magento URL checkout/cart with your custom page, and voila, the Magento checkout is disabled. It's probably best to replace as well the Magento URL checkout/onepage to prevent the whole checkout.
Instead of a content-item, you could even replace the pages with a form - for instance, when products can only be ordered by using manual quotes. It would still not be perfect, because the form would need to fetch data from MageBridge to show which product is actually choosen by the customer. We have already build such a custom form by using the Nooku Framework combined with the MageBridge API to fetch product-information from Magento: The MageBridge logic only requires three lines of code. We will release tutorials on how we did this in the future.