Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

Step-by-step: Creating a MageBridge Menu-Item

While Magento also has menus and links, with MageBridge 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! links but also links to products, categories and other Magento pages. This tutorial shows how to create a Menu-Item step-by-step.

Create a new Menu-Item

Login to the Joomla! Administrator backend and browse under Menus to the menu you want to edit. After this, a list of existing Menu-Items is displayed.

Click on New. A new page will load and on this page you need to choose the type of Menu-Item you want to create. When creating links to MageBridge pages, you need to select MageBridge under Internal Link. This will collapse several other options. We will just choose "Category" here.

Configure the Menu-Item

Just like any other Menu-Item we need to configure the common properties of the Menu-Item, like a title or alias. On the right hand side, you will need to configure the specific settings for MageBridge.

Depending on the type of Menu-Item there are different things to be configured here. You can find a listing below of the various types.

Select a category

As example, we choose "Category" which means we are now configuring a Menu-Item that points to a Magento category-page. The obvious question here is: Which category? Clicking on Select will make a popup box appear which displays a list of Magento categories.

Note that the list of categories is fetched real-time through the bridge. If the list is empty, you haven't configured categories in Magento yet, or the bridge is not operational. If you encounter problems here, please read the MageBridge Troubleshooting Guide for more information.

Within the popup box, select the category of your choice. The popup box will close.

If there is no Select button (like in the screenshot below), this means the bridge is functioning properly or you have disabled the API-widgets. Browse to Components » MageBridge » Configuration to review the settings.

Other types of Menu-Items

MageBridge in general allows you to point a Menu-Item to any page within Magento. The following types exist:

• Category: Display a specific category-page
• Product: Display a specific product-details page
• Account: Display the current users account-settings
• Cart: Display the current cart
• Checkout: Display the checkout-page
• Wishlist: Display the current users wishlist
• Login: Display the login-page
• Logout: Logout the current user directly or with an intermediate page

Root Menu-Item and custom pages

Besides these types, there are also two other types that are important:

• Root
• Custom page

The Root Menu-Item should only be configured once in Joomla! and it serves at the homepage of MageBridge - it actually displays the Magento homepage. By giving this Root Menu-Item a generic title like "Shop", the usage of MageBridge becomes more intuitive on the frontend.

The type Custom Page allows you to enter a custom Magento URL. Note that, when using MageBridge, a customer never has to leave the Joomla! page - Magento URLs are there for transformed into Joomla! pages.

Custom pages are useful when you want to integrate extra Magento modules within your Joomla! site.