Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

Bad MageBridge sites

With MageBridge you can build beautiful webshops, much better than with Magento standalone. But in the real world, we see a lot of errors in MageBridge shops when they go live. Using our online tutorials you can find all information to correct these matters, but it seems the developers often lack time. Here's our rant.

Extend themes in the proper way

Building your own Joomla! template requires a lot of time, and often sitebuilders choose to extend an existing template instead. However, as soon as you start to extend that template (modifying CSS, override images), it's better to rename the template: Instead of using the original name (for instance yoo_air), you rename it to something else that makes sense (yireo_air).

With MageBridge, the same counts for the Magento CSS. When you choose to override CSS-code, it is often best to disable all original Magento CSS-code and use the MageBridge CSS-code instead: Within your template-directory you can add a file css/com_magebridge/default.css that gets you going. Modifying a Magento CSS-file blue.css to give the site a green appearance makes no sense and should be avoided.

What? No SEF?

Any Joomla! site that wants to be taken seriously should have SEF enabled. If the platform is based on Apache (and not Microsoft IIS) most likely the Apache mod_rewrite is in place as well, and there should be no reason whatsoever to leave the setting Use Apache mod_rewrite disabled.

Make sure the site is cleanly written

Every shop that wants to get customers, needs to be W3C compliant. Period.

MageBridge specific

Specifically for MageBridge, you'll want to have a MageBridge RootMenu-Item at all times: This makes sure various Joomla! Menu-Items pointing to the Magento shop, do not lead to a huge number of duplicate pages: Google hates duplicate content, and having a MageBridge Root Menu-Item helps you solve it.

Optimize the performance

Magento is often said to be slow. Everybody who puts a Magento site into production, but who doesn't do anything about performance, could be called very sloppy. MageBridge offers some small enhancements like using Google API or Protoaculous, but with extra Joomla! extensions you can do many other things: Combine CSS-files, content caching, compress output.

Needless to say, you'll also want to optimize things on the Magento side. Enabling Magento caching is the first thing to do when going live, but you'll also need a good hosting environment to run Magento as it was supposed to do.

Remove the generator-tag

Within the Joomla! template, it is also mandatory to remove thepointless Joomla! 1.5 Generator tag. To do this, you can just add thefollowing PHP-lines to the template index.php:

$document =& JDocument::getDocument();
$document->setGenerator(null);

Much much more

When going through all our tutorials, you will learn that there is muchmuch more to MageBridge then just a simple bridge: It offers a completenew way to develop Magento shops, but it requires you to get into it anduse all the tools available. Hope you enjoy our readings.