Around 1 year ago, MageBridgeTM was first released to the public. With it, we not only brought you a brand new extension with exiting new features - we actually opened up a whole new market: Bringing the power of MagentoTM to the Joomla! public, and bringingthe flexibility of Joomla!TM to Magento administrators.
Benefits and limitations
With MageBridge, we introduced new concepts in e-commerce and slowly these concepts are taking shape: Magento offers good e-commerce and a lot of flexibility, but lacks user-friendliness - and exactly these issues are solved with MageBridge.
But it's not all shining: Many Joomla! sites are built with a lack of CSS- and HTML-knowledge, but with Magento this gives big head-aches. Magento requires a good solid technical knowledge, and - while MageBridge makes live a lot easier - it doesn't change that: Magento stays flexible but complicated.
Scare off the laymen
With our MageBridge support we experienced this the hard way. Often, Magento was seen as too complicated, but MageBridge was than applied as some kind of super-glue that would fix everything. Therefor, we have been tuning MageBridge continously to make it more user-friendliness.
But also, we have been changing our marketing strategy to basically scare off people that don't know much of webdesign, and therefor shouldn't start with Magento in the first place.
More than a bridge - a new way of e-commerce
While MageBridge enhances Magento with a lot of CMS-features (and if you're just starting with MageBridge, you probably can't grasp yet how flexible this can become), but more exciting are actually the marketing strategies that come along with it: With Magento, you focus on the selling process. With MageBridge, you suddenly can focus on customer experience and marketing.
Giving customers access to protected downloads, letting write customers their own blogs, managing pieces of content inside the Magento checkout, private sales, one-product sites - there are many opportunities that are hard to accomplish with Magento stand-alone, but easy as hell with MageBridge.
Where do we go next?
Since July 2009 we've been working continuously on MageBridge. Besides working on it's core functionality, we've been running customer projects ourselves, developed template-patches for RocketTheme and YOOtheme, experimented with Anahita and Nooku Framework, and published a load of Magento and Joomla! tutorials to help webdevelopers doing their job.
And we plan to do even more. Take a look at our MageBridge Roadmap to see what is coming up next.
