MageBridge on Joomla!Days NL
Saturday, 13 June 2009
Yesterday we were in the opportunity to present MageBridge during the Joomla!Days 2009 in the Netherlands. For a room filled with people interested in both Joomla! as well as Magento, Jisse Reitsma of Yireo gave a presentation on the backgrounds of MageBridge.
As MageBridge will become the second e-commerce solution for Joomla! after VirtueMart, during the presentation a short comparison was made between VirtueMart and MageBridge by pointing out the downsides of both products. Also the licensing scheme - using the free GPL for the Joomla! side, while using a commercial EULA for the Magento side - was explained. Last but not least a demonstration was given of the MageBridge solution.
To give you all an update on the current status of MageBridge: We plan to release the first version in July, which is already coming up soon. The main concept - browsing the Magento store within Joomla! - is working, except for some bugs caused by exceptions in Magento modules. Other features like user authentication, Single Sign On, product search, one-click upgrades, debug-logging are working as well. Also a new feature was introduced this week: By entering Meta Keywords within a Joomla! article, the MageBridge Tags Content Plugin (a mouth-full, we know) gives a listing of related products in the bottom of this article. Soon the demo-site will be updated, so you can see these changes in action.
The work upcoming months will be to make the store-browsing completely stable, handling all exceptions. Also user synchronization is working in its concepts, but still needs to be finalized. We have decided not to release any free beta-version, but the release in end of July will be followed quickly by patch-versions as soon as bugs may arrise.