MageBridge integration with Nooku Framework

With the Nooku Framework, Joomla! extensions can be build fast and professionally - but still e-commerce capabilities are missing in its features. By combining the Nooku Framework with the easy-to-use MageBridge API you can create your own MageBridge/Nooku extension.

Integrating Nooku Content

First of all, MageBridge already supports the use of the Nooku Content component. You can use this to add multi-linguality to your MageBridge shop. The Nooku component is used to determine the right language, the MageBridge Store Connector (shipped with the MageBridge core) links this language to the right Magento store, and the Magento store makes sure that same language is also loaded in Magento.

Supporting Nooku Server

Nooku Server is a specialized Nooku-based Joomla! distributions, aimed to run Nooku-based extensions easily. The MageBridge roadmap lists an effort to make MageBridge compatible on Nooku Server.

Integration with Anahita Social Engine

Another integration that is listed on the MageBridge roadmap is an integration between Anahita Social Engine (based on Nooku Framework) and MageBridge. This integration will include a specific MageBridge Profile Connector to synchronize fields between Anahita user-profiles and Magento customer-data. It will also include a MageBridge Product Connector which will allow you to sell Anahita group-access through MageBridge.

Linking from within your own Nooku component to the MageBridge API

With our API-documentation, you can call the MageBridge classes to fetch certain information and reuse that information within your Nooku extension. In most cases, the MageBridge API only requires you to write 3 or 4 lines of code. The rest is up to you. However it would ofcourse be nice if the integration went further than this.

The future of Nooku and MageBridge

MageBridge is NOT written using the Nooku Framework API, but uses a combination of the Joomla! Framework API and it's own API instead. Most likely, MageBridge will never be rewritten in Nooku, because of the bridging aspects with Magento that are too specific for Nooku to solve. Terms like MVC are - for instance - of little importance with MageBridge.

Nooku extensions can be built using widgets and behaviors, and one nice feature that would add to the Nooku / MageBridge link would be if MageBridge is able to offer behaviors to other Nooku extensions - for instance the add-to-cart-button, or specific Magento product information. This will be part of future projects.