Setting the MageBridge URLs in Magento - Yireo

MageBridge - Magento settings

When MageBridge is up and running, it calls Magento through an API. But this also requires Magento to be setup properly. Most of the settings will be filled in by MageBridge automatically without your intervention. But some settings need to be configured within Magento, before starting with MageBridge. Here's a listing.

Required settings

The following settings are required to work properly with MageBridge:

General > Web > Url Options > Redirect to Base URL if requested URL doesn't match it: No

This setting was introduced with Magento 1.4. If set to Yes, it prevents MageBridge from loading the Magento shop properly - most commonly crashing the shop with endless redirects. You need to set this option to No to make MageBridge work together with Magento 1.4 or later.

Recommended settings

The following settings are recommended, especially if you are fully integrating Magento into Joomla! (which is the default for MageBridge):

Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Product URL Suffix: empty
Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Category URL Suffix: empty

If you want to have URL suffixes in your product URLs (ending with .html) you need to configure this in Joomla!, not in Magento.

General > Web > Url Options > Add Store Code to Urls: No

Because MageBridge deals with the logic of which Magento store to load under which circumstances, this setting is useless and is better to be turned off. Actually if you use advanced tools like the MageBridge template-helper class, this will stop things from working. Disable it by setting it to No.

Optional settings

The following settings are not required, but highly recommendable because they will make your MageBridge shop more accessible to search engines, or solve common problems.

General > Web > Search Engines Optimization > Use Web Server Rewrites: Yes

Without this setting your URLs will not be optimized for Search Engines. This counts for MageBridge but also for Magento stand-alone. You will need to make sure your webserver supports access-files (Apache).

General > Web > Session Cookie Management > Cookie Domain: empty
General > Web > Session Cookie Management > Cookie Path: empty

Cookies are needed to keep track of user sessions. Not only does a browser maintain a cookie-based session with Joomla! and Magento, MageBridge also uses cookies to maintain it's session with Magento. To make sure MageBridge is able to operate correctly, it's recommended to leave the two settings empty.

Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Use categories path for product URLs: Yes

This is another standard SEO-trick, which is not specific for MageBridge but just aids to a good site. A good product-URL not only includes the product-alias but also the categories it exists in.

Module settings

We highly recommend you disable some of the Magento modules, because their functionality can much better be replaced with Joomla! extensions. These modules can be found by navigating to Advanced > Disable Modules Output within the System Configuration.

• Mage_Poll
• Mage_Newsletter
• Mage_Contacts
• Mage_Sitemap

Of course test things properly before making these changes in a live environment. To see which Joomla! alternatives exist, check out the page Integrating MageBridge with other Joomla! extensions.