MageBridge administration tutorials

In some situations, it is needed to set a hard definition of the MageBridge URLs in Magento. Normally, MageBridge is able to set the right URLs dynamically. But if a specific caching engine is combined with frequent visits of the stand-alone Magento site, it might happen that stand-alone Magento^TM URLs end-up in the cache being used by MageBridge^TM. In other words: Magento URLs on a Joomla!^TM site - which is wrong.

While you should enable Magento^TM caching at all production sites, the caching ability of MageBridge^TM can give your site even more performance. However, this performance gain is not as straightforward as caching in Magento. This whitepaper gives you more details.

While one of the key features that MageBridge^TM offers is user synchronization, there are cases in which you want to disable user synchronization. This takes some work - documented in this tutorial - but the end result is that the Magento^TM users are kept separate from Joomla!^TM users.

Why prevent user synchronization?

There are a couple of cases in which user synchronization gives bad results. For instance, if you want to connect one single Magento site to hundreds of Joomla! sites, this is perfectly possible with MageBridge. But syncing one Magento customer to all these Joomla! sites is bound to be slow.

Besides performance, also things are more complicated with user synchronization. You need to make sure the bridge is operational at all times, while if you disable user synchronization you still have the powerfull visual integration MageBridge has to offer.

Joomla! plugins

To disable user synchronization, the best thing is to disable the following Joomla! plugins alltogether:

• User - MageBridge
• Authentication - MageBridge

Joomla! settings

Within the MageBridge Configuration in the Joomla! backend, use the following settings:

• Single Sign On: No
• User synchronization: No
• Backend authentication: No
• Frontend authentication: No

Magento settings

Within the MageBridge settings in the Magento backend, use the following settings under the Other Settings tab:

• Enable Joomla! Authentication: No

Magento event forwarding

Within the MageBridge settings in the Magento backend, disable the following events:

• address_save_after
• admin_session_user_login_success
• adminhtml_customer_save_after
• adminhtml_customer_delete_after
• customer_delete_after
• customer_save_after
• customer_login
• customer_logout

With MageBridge, we always recommend to use two separate VirtualHosts for Magento^TM and Joomla!^TM - this guarantees optimal performance and security. But because each VirtualHost also uses a separate domain, this would require you to purchase two SSL-certificates as well. To bypass this problem, you could try to remove the Magento URL from each MageBridge^TM page. This tutorial explains how to do this.

With MageBridge, new users are automatically synchronized: If a new customer has been created in Magento^TM, MageBridge^TM will automatically create a corresponding user in Joomla!^TM - as soon as the user logs in, or as soon as the user-record is edited in the backend. But if you have an existing userbase that you want to migrate at once, you need to follow a procedure which is a bit more complex. This tutorial helps you out.

When you move a MageBridge environment to another server, there are various things you need to do to get things working again. In general, you are moving a Joomla!^TM application and a Magento^TM application - which should be copied as you normally would. MageBridge^TM only brings in one database table that needs changing.

The JCE-editor is the most popular editor for Joomla!^TM, and allows you to easily add images and links to your content. With the MageBridgeLinks/JCE plugin you can also easily add MageBridge^TM product-links or category-links to your content. This document explains the installation and usage.

With MageBridge, e-commerce within Joomla!^TM is brought to a higher level. But the flexibility that MageBridge gives you also requires better planning. This whitepaper discusses the best practices for setting up a MageBridge^TM-based website.

Within MageBridge^TM, connectors are used to do all kinds of things: With Product Connectors you can do something in Joomla!^TM when a Magento^TM product is being sold. This opens up for tons of opportunities, like selling access to DOCman downloads or adding a customer to a certain JomSocial group. Here are some general guidelines for Product Connectors.

When you add MageBridge^TM to an existing configuration (an existing Joomla! site or an existing Magento^TM site), you'll want to make sure that existing customers can still use their login. This tutorial discusses the details of migrating users from Joomla!^TM to Magento, or vice versa.

The following questions can be asked to your hosting provider to make sure that MageBridge^TM runs fine on top of the hosting environment:

The Magento^TM multi-site concept is flexible but a little complex. It uses three levels which can be used in various ways: Websites, Stores and Store Views. Within the MageBridge^TM Configuration the entire Joomla!^TM-side of the bridge is configured as a Website. But within this Joomla! site you can still use Stores and Store Views for various purposes. For instance: To load a different theme.

The MageBridge^TM Configuration in the Joomla!^TM backend allows you to easily switch from one Magento Website to another, by just selecting this other Website in a drop-down box. Also switching from one Magento^TM instance to another is nothing more than just entering the new API-details. But are there any caveats?

Duplicate content is regarded by many bad for search engine optimization. Though it could be argued whether this is needed or not, you might be tempted to make the Magento^TM webshop only accessible through Joomla!^TM and not any more by accessing the Magento application directly. While MageBridge translates every single Magento-link to a MageBridge link, visitors can still visit the Magento application if they would know the direct URL. Because MageBridge^TM serves the same content as Magento does, this is duplicate content. And if visitors can access Magento directly, there is a (very small) chance search engines will find out about this as well.

Securing your webshop using SSL-certificates is one of the basic administrative tasks when setting up the site. Providing SSL-security should be seen mandatory for a webshop. Using a more expensive EAV-certificate adds confidence to the users experience. This tutorial explains how to deal with SSL within MageBridge^TM.

Within the Joomla!^TM architecture, Content Plugins allow you to modify articles or other types of content just before the content is sent back to the browser. The MageBridge^TM Content Plugin uses this functionality but instead of changing the content itself, it makes Magento^TM responsible for changing the content.

MageBridge offers a clean way to integrate Magento in Joomla! without reinventing the wheel. By copying the Magento^TM theme output into the component area and module areas of Joomla!, in most cases the output is still 100% W3C-compliant. If it's not, you need to solve this by modifying the theme - either the Joomla!^TM template or the Magento theme. This guide sums up most of the common practices to optimize your MageBridge^TM-site.

When you want to deinstall MageBridge^TM, things are easy in Joomla!^TM, but more complicated in Magento^TM. Here's the procedure to follow.

Adding a new Magento^TM block to Joomla!^TM is easy: You can use the MageBridge^TM Custom Block module to easily insert an existing Magento block as a Joomla! module on your page. This guide gives you all the information you need.

While MageBridge^TM offers its main functionality in the form of a Joomla! component and several Joomla! plugins, there are several extra extensions (modules, plugins and connectors) that allow you to configure specific things for your Joomla!^TM site. To prevent all these extra add-ons flooding your installation, we have decided to seperate required add-ons from optional add-ons.

While MageBridge^TM is first of all a Joomla! extension, that supports Joomla! SEF, it also brings content from Magento^TM to Joomla!. When dealing with URL-suffices, this complicates things. Joomla!^TM is unaware of the logic that Magento uses and vice versa. If you want to implement URL-suffices, please follow the steps below.

To use MageBridge^TM, you need to create an API user in Magento^TM. This API user is also related to a so-called API role. By default, there is neither API user nor API role, so you need to configure both.

Within Joomla!^TM, MageBridge uses a lot of plugins to handle various things. For instance, authentication and user synchronization are handled through plugins. By default, after installing MageBridge^TM through its installer, all plugins are disabled. Here you can find the steps to activate these plugins.

While Magento^TM also has menus and links, with MageBridge^TM you don't need to worry about those. You can create regular Joomla! Menu-Items pointing to specific Magento pages. This allows you to build a menu with regular Joomla!^TM links but also links to products, categories and other Magento pages. This tutorial shows how to create a Menu-Item step-by-step.

Within Magento^TM, you need to create an API-user for usage with MageBridge^TM. This API-user is connected to an API-role, and this API-role implies a set of permissions (Role Resources) to certain parts of Magento. To make it easy to configure, we recommend to select just all permissions for the API-user. But if you want to increase security, you need to know which resources are needed to run MageBridge. Here's a listing.

Configuring payment methods in MageBridge is nothing more than just configuring the payment method as you would in Magento^TM, except that the URLs you might need to configure point to Joomla!^TM instead of MageBridge^TM. Let's walk through all the steps.

Setting up a website with both Magento as Joomla!, can not only be more than a days job - it can also introduce new security risks. Primarily, the risks in one application (Magento^TM or Joomla!) could endanger the application. Here we discuss which security measures could (or should) be taken in both Joomla!^TM as Magento to secure the lot.

Upgrading MageBridge^TM is very straight-forward and because updates will become available rapidly, we recommend you always stick to the latest version. But this is not the same for Joomla!^TM and Magento^TM. Here are our recommendations.

The MageBridge^TM suite installs a lot of different modules within Joomla!^TM. Here's an overview of which modules are available with a brief description of what they do.

When working with two applications which both contain user-records, it is important to know how these applications interact with each other when dealing with users. For instance if an user logs into Joomla!^TM and that user does not exist yet in Magento, should this user-record be automatically created in Magento^TM? This whitepaper explains more about how MageBridge^TM deals with users.

With MageBridge^TM there are many setups possible. However each setup has its own challenges, which we try to sum up in this tutorial.

MageBridge makes it much easier to build a Joomla!^TM-based e-commerce website, but with any good website performance is an important issue. This article tells you more about the performance issues of MageBridge^TM and what you can do to improve the performance.