Revolutionary in Magento, basic stuff in Joomla!
Friday, 04 December 2009One of the new features of MageBridge 1.2 is a Joomla!-based module that shows Magento products in various ways. It allows you to display a sidebar of products, configurable through the parameters of the module, without you knowing anything of Magento theming. Such a functionality is revolutionary in Magento, but it's actually basic stuff in Joomla!.
Features of the Products Module
The module allows you to sort products by various fields, thus creating lists like "Latest Products", "Random Products" and "Most Popular Products". The module can be configured to read products from a specific category or all categories. Also neat is the fact that if MageBridge is showing a specific product-page, that product is stripped from the dynamically built list of products in the module. Listing that product and linking it to the exact same page would be a useless thing anyway.
Furthermore, the module allows you to turn on or off various product details like the title, description, image and price. All links lead to the products detail page. And if you don't like the XHTML-layout, you can always create a Joomla! template override to change itself. You don't have to deal with Magento templating for this.
MageBridge is about usability
This module actually costed little time to build. The majority of work was already put into building the actual bridge, and since version 1.0 this is working properly, so from that on we could focus on things that should be passed through the bridge.
Also MageBridge ships with things we call "API Widgets". These are basic form elements (dropdowns, input-fields, modal select-boxes) but with extra MageBridge logic added to them. For instance, when you choose to configure the Products Module with a category, you don't need to mess around with category-IDs, but you just click to select the category of your choice inside a modal popux-box (Lightbox).
The API Widgets are completely integrated into the Joomla! Administrator, so most administrators will not even notice that they are there. But actually, they are one of the more powerful features of MageBridge, adding usability to fields that are otherwise difficult to configure.
We hope to add more of these modules and usability features as MageBridge grows in functionality. Joomla! is easy so why not focus on making Magento easier as well by using MageBridge?