Tagging in MageBridge
Tuesday, 29 September 2009While MageBridge its primary task is to connect Joomla! with Magento and vice versa, it aims to integrate the two applications at more than one level. For instance the Search Plugin adds Magento products to the Joomla! search, but MageBridge also allows for tagging to integrate the two types of content (products and articles).
Why tagging?
Tagging of content allows visitors to select similar content by clicking on some keyword (the tag). The main point here is that visitors are more likely to find the thing they are looking for, and this adds to the visitors experience of the site. And what's good for visitors is good for search engines - tagging is a popular technique to gain a higher pagerank of some kind.
It's important to realize that tagging does add to the usability, but in many cases should not replace traditional navigational methods like search or menus. It should be seen as an addon service of the site.
Tagging in Magento
Products can be tagged by customers in Magento. From the frontend, customers can submit new tags and submitted tags can be reviewed from the backend. The Magento Admin Panel also offers a way to add new tags from the backend, however there is no option to add existing tags to products from within the backend. On the frontend, Magento offers a "Most Popular Tags" block and pages that display all products for a certain tag.
Tagging in Joomla!
Joomla! by default doesn't ship with tagging by default. Many times the "Meta Keywords" of an article are used for tagging of some kind instead. Alternatively there are third party extensions that add tagging to Joomla!, including modules and tag-pages.
MageBridge tagging plugin
MageBridge offers a plugin with the name "Content - MageBridge Tags" which allows to display a product listing inside a Joomla! article by using tagging as select-criterium. Because Joomla! has no tagging by default, the plugin uses the Meta Keywords instead. Integration with third party extensions is not planned yet, but driven by the demand of MageBridge customers.
Plugin template overrides
One cool feature of this tagging plugin is that it allows for template overrides. Template overrides or layout overrides is a Joomla! feature that allows copying a layout-file of some extension to the Joomla! template, and thus making upgrades of the extension less troublesome.
Template overrides exist out-of-the-box for modules and component, because they make heavy use of layout-files. Normally a Joomla! plugin doesn't add that much HTML to the page, but the MageBridge tagging plugin does. And because designers will need to customize the HTML added by the plugin, we have allowed for a template override to be created.
Inside the templates override-directory "html" a new folder named "plg_magebridgetags" can be created with a copy of the plugins layout-file (plugins/content/magebridgetags/default.php). When loading the page, Joomla! will use the template-copy instead of the original copy.
Adding Joomla! articles to Magento products
The MageBridge tagging plugin takes the approach of adding Magento products to Joomla! articles, but the reverse is also possible. The MageBridge configuration allows you to parse Magento blocks by Joomla! Content Plugins. This means that everything that is possible with Joomla! content through the usage of Content Plugins, is also possible with Magento content.
This opens up for a whole range of possibilities, from adding MP3-players to Magento product-pages to the addition of related content (for instance when tagging). In the future, MageBridge will also add a full-blown content plugin that allows for insertion of Magento blocks and product information into any Joomla! content.