Yesterday the first MageBridgeTM bootcamp took place in The Netherlands and it was a success. The day served was ment not only to introduce MageBridge to those who were interested, but also to take a look under the hood of this new MageBridge technology.
Technical aspects
The participants of the day were primarily people with more-than-average technical skills. Therefor the day not only focussed on dealing with the visual integration of MagentoTM within Joomla!TM (which is easily demonstrated), but also all the extensions that make part of the so-called extension suite which is MageBridge.
Lead developer Jisse Reitsma demonstrated the main features of MageBridge to everybody. Not only common features like the component-navigation, search-integration and Magento optimization were delt with, but there was also time to dive deaper into problems surrounding combined theming (the combination of the Magento theme with the Joomla! template on a single webpage) and the connector architecture (which makes it very easy to program extensions on top of MageBridge).
RocketTheme template modifications
Webdesigner Hans Kuijpers gave a practical demonstration of how to make the Magento Default Theme integrate seamlessly into Joomla! using MageBridge, combined with Joomla! templates of RocketTheme. His presentation not only dealt with CSS, but also PHP-code from the MageBridge template-library.
T-Toys use-case
Webdeveloper Felix Geurts of FeliCom gave as a MageBridge customer a talk on the combination Joomla!, Magento and MageBridge as it was applied to the webshop of T-Toys (currently the new site is not yet live).
Felix addressed not only the added value of MageBridge, but also gave some practical examples of how to add third party modules to Magento to solve certain issues, without the need to alter PHP-code. The T-Toys website was in this a very powerful example, because it based itself upon a multi-site environment in which the default shipping was extended with a custom pickup-option.
Impressions
In short: This first MageBridge bootcamp was a great day, with a lot of interesting subjects. We will most certainy repeat this bootcamp within a couple of months!
Checkout the photos of this day on our Dutch training site.
