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 MageBridgeTM-based website.
Think before you click
With Joomla!, many people start clicking things together without a proper plan. With MagentoTM, such a strategy will cause you a lot of frustration in the end: More functionality comes at the price of more complexity, which means that you have to review your steps carefully beforehand. Make sure you understand why you disable or enable a certain setting, or even better: Document your steps all the way.
Most of the problems that people have when starting with Magento (and therefor MageBridge) are caused by configuration changes that they do not understand.
Use a MageBridge Root Menu-Item
Thanks to MageBridge the whole Magento shop becomes available in Joomla!. But because Magento depends for some behaviour on the Magento homepage, this homepage should be made available as well in Joomla!. You can do this by adding a MageBridge Root Menu-Item to your site. This is highly recommendable to prevent duplicate URLs.
Only install those 3rd party extensions that you really need
Joomla! allows you to easily install and uninstall extensions. But this doesn't mean that you should. Be careful with adding new extensions - they might break the functionality of MageBridge itself or one of the Magento extensions you have installed. Also be aware of the JavaScript conflict.
Even better: You should have a technical design for your webshop - preferably in a document. If the extension is not listed in this document (and added with a good reason), you can just as well remove the extension all together.
Choose a good hosting environment
Magento is often blamed for not being very fast. This depends completely on the hosting environment, because there are enough performance-tricks to make Magento run lightning fast. Dedicated servers certainly offer the best tuning, but shared hosting enviroments can also be optimized: Choose a Magento-tuned hosting environment, and just an any-application environnment.
The requirement for a business plan
While Joomla! itself is perfect for quickly setting up a website, Magento is not. The concept is entirely different: While a Joomla! site serves many times as some kind of business card, with Magento the webshop itself is the business. And the success of business depends on the business concept. Make sure there is a solid business plan before starting off.
If you're a webdeveloper and you have been asked by a customer to build a webshop, ask the customer for a business plan. If there is no business plan, there's probably not much budget either. How can you make money without a good investment?
Plan enough time
Magento is complicated, and therefor requires time to get used to it, time to make the right decisions. If you are running into problems while facing an impossible deadline, this shows that you made the major mistake of not planning enough.
Tune the performance
Once the site is ready for production, make sure you optimize both Joomla! and Magento for performance. Our separate MageBridge Performance Tuning guide gives you suggestions.
