For your convenience, all settings of the MageBridge component in Joomla!TM are listed in this article. Also a short note on the settings of MageBridgeTM in MagentoTM can be found in the bottom of this page.
Basic Mode and Advanced Mode
Within the MageBridge Configuration page you can switch between Basic Mode and Advanced Mode. All options listed on this page are available under Advanced Mode. If you are viewing the Basic Model, some options are not available.
Tab "License"
| Licensing |
| License key |
The license key as given on the YireoTM website. Without this license key, you will not be able to receive any updates. You will also need to have the same license-key in both Magento as Joomla!. |
Tab "API"
| Magento settings |
| Hostname |
The domainname of your Magento installation. This should be the same as mentioned in your Yireo Licensing settings. Unless you're experimenting with Magento multi-site, this domainname also equals the same hostname under which the Magento Admin Panel is visited. Note that "www.example.com" is not the same as "example.com". |
| Protocol |
The protocol being used to access Magento through the MageBridge API. This can be either HTTP or HTTPS, while HTTPS offers more security (even without an official SSL-certificate) and is therefor recommended. Actually this option is overruled by the option "Enforce SSL", so it doesn't matter what you enter here. This option will be removed in future versions. |
| Method |
The preferred method to access Magento is POST, but in some situations you will need to configure GET. Leave this setting on the default POST, unless we have indicated that it's needed to use GET. The GET-option will be removed in future versions. |
| Basedir |
The basedir to access Magento. If the URL to Magento would be something like "http://example.com/magento", then the basedir would be "magento". If the URL is "http://example.com/", the basedir should be left empty. |
| HTTP Authentication |
Enable this option if your Magento site is protected using some kind of HTTP Authentication. When you enable this you need to fill in the two settings below as well. This option is not recommended for production sites. |
| HTTP Username |
The username used with HTTP Authentication. |
| HTTP Password |
The password used with HTTP Authentication. |
| API settings |
| API user |
The API-user as configured in Magento through System » Web Services » Users. |
| API key |
The API-key as configured in Magento through System » Web Services » Users. This key acts like a password, so feel free to enter a very long and difficult password in Magento. |
Tab "Bridge"
| API Widgets |
| API widgets |
The API-widgets will add GUI-elements like selectboxes and modal-boxes to the Joomla! backend, which make it a lot easier to configure things like the Magento store and selecting categories or products. However, these widgets contact Magento through the MageBridge API, and even though caching is used, this may slow things done. We recommend to leave this setting enabled at all times. |
| Website |
| Backend |
The path to your Magento Admin Panel. Normally this is "admin", but for security reasons this could be renamed to something else. If the API Widgets are enabled, this setting is automatically detected and does not need to be filled in. |
| Website ID |
This setting refers to the Magento "Website" as configured through System » Manage Stores. With Magento you can configure multiple "Websites" and this setting allows multiple Joomla! websites to connect to the same Magento application, while still offering a different product-catalog.
The input-field here is a so-called API-widget: As soon as you have configured the API-user and API-password correctly, the default input-field changes into a select-box which makes it easier to configure this setting. If you don't use the widget but the regular input-box instead, make sure you use the numeric ID of the website - not its name.
|
| SSL settings |
| Enforce SSL |
This option allows you to dynamically enable or disable SSL. For instance, you can set this option to "Shop only" which will also make sure that all non-shop pages are served through non-SSL. The MageBridge System Plugin needs to be activated for this setting. |
| Offline settings |
| Offline |
The whole webshop in Joomla! can be set offline, which basically means that the bridge is down. However, the Magento frontend is still up and running under its own URL, which gives you the option for maintenance.
|
| Offline message |
When the bridge is offline, this text is displayed in the Joomla! component-area.
|
Tab "User synchronization"
| User synchronization |
| Magento customer-group |
When a customer is created within Magento, you can determine in which group to place this new user. This setting does not effect the behavior when a customer is added from within Magento stand-alone. |
| Single Sign On |
By enabling this setting, users who login into Joomla! are also automatically logged in within Magento. But because Magento is never accessed directly, but always through MageBridge, this option sounds cool but is actual not relevant at all. It's safe to disable this feature. |
| User Synchronization |
With this option enabled, as soon as a Joomla! user is modified (by himself or by an administrator) the updated record will be sent to Magento, and the corresponding Magento customer will be updated as well. You most probably want to keep this feature enabled. |
| Username from Email |
This is a very tricky setting. Magento uses email-addresses to authenticate users, but Joomla! uses usernames. This is confusing, and therefor MageBridge offers the option to keep the username synced with the email-address. This is probably only useful if you create Joomla! template overrides and changes in the Joomla! language-packs as well. |
| Backend Authentication |
This option allows Magento authentication within the Joomla! backend. With this feature enabled, once Magento or the bridge is down, you will not be able to login to the backend. Therefor it might be safer to keep this setting disabled. |
| Frontend Authentication |
This option allows Magento authentication within the Joomla! frontend. Enabling this feature is highly recommended. |
Tab "Theming"
| Theming |
| Because these settings allow for so many configurations, they are not explained here, but instead in the seperate tutorial Theming Options in MageBridge. |
Tab "Other settings"
| Advanced settings |
| Use Root Menu |
By default, MageBridge appends the Magento URLs to the current menu-item. If you want to use the MageBridge Root Menu-Item instead, enable it here. |
| Enable system messages |
Normally system messages (generated by Magento) are displayed inside the component area. But your Joomla! system messages might be displayed somewhere else. This option allows you to convert Magento system messages into Joomla! system messages. However, you will need to customize the Magento theme to disable the messages there - otherwise the system messages will be displayed twice. |
| Enable Joomla! 404 |
By default, if Magento is unable to find a page, it redirects the user to a Magento 404 page. Because Joomla! already contains similar behaviour, it might be useful to convert every Magento 404 to a Joomla! 404. This way you only need to style the Joomla! 404-pages. |
| Modify URL |
In almost all cases, you want this setting to be enabled. It gives MageBridge the signal to alter all Magento URLs into MageBridge URLs. Disabling this feature will lead you away from MageBridge to the stand-alone Magento site, which also disables all the features of MageBridge itself. |
| Forward SEF |
By default, this setting is enabled and disabling this feature might break your site. This setting makes sure the Joomla! SEF URL is sent to Magento, so Magento can use it to construct its own URLs. If disabled, this might cause some Magento modules to fail but this is the only workaround for sh404SEF to work. In the near future, sh404SEF support will be withdrawn due to the outdated architecture that it uses, and this option will be removed as well. |
| Spoof browser |
When you are browsing through Joomla!/MageBridge, the bridge tries to impersonate your browser on the Magento side. Because Magento introduces various security mechanisms to protect the browser session, MageBridge needs to undertake various counter-measures to fool Magento - we call this "spoofing". Sometimes a webserver does not allow this, causing the bridge to fail. In this case, you need to disable this setting and possibly lower the security on the Magento side. |
| Spoof headers |
The bridge is able to transfer any HTTP-headers from Magento to Joomla!, but some hosting environments do not allow this kind of spoofing. However, this option is needed to offer the functionality of Magento Dowloadable Products. If you encounter any bugs here, let us know. |
| Enable Content Plugins |
When fetching Magento blocks from the Magento theme, you can optionally parse this content through the Joomla! Content Plugins. This allows for Joomla! plugin-tags to be entered in Magento product-description, which offers many flexible configurations like linking Joomla! articles to a specific product. |
| Payment URLs |
This expert-option normally should not be used at all. When the "Redirect SSL" option is set to enable SSL only on the checkout-pages (which is experimental), MageBridge needs to be instructed which URLs are secure and which are not. If the payment gateway returns a POST-request when a Magento order is placed, still nothing needs to be done here (example: PayPal). But with payment gateways that return a GET-request, the path of that return URL needs to be placed here. This counts for iDEAL ("ideal") and MultiSafePay ("msp"). A valid entry here would be: "ideal, msp". |
| Debug settings |
| Debug |
When things go wrong, we try to help you out where possible. But a good analysis of the problem is also required. As soon as a problem can be simulated, turn on debugging. This will dump various debugging-lines per request into the Joomla! database, which can then be exported through the Logs page. This setting however is also depending on Debug IP. |
| Debug IP |
Turning on debugging will dump a lot of information in the logs. To prevent flooding of your site, requests will only be logged when the IP-address of that request is entered here. "Debug IP" can contain a comma-seperated list of IP-addresses. Your own IP-address can be found just below this setting. |
| Debug log |
Debug-messages can be written to the database, a separate debug-file or both. The database is used by default. |
MageBridge settings in Magento
When browsing within the Magento Admin Panel to the MageBridge settings you will find some settings as well. The first tab Joomla! connection does not need to filled in. As soon as you save the MageBridge settings in Joomla!, settings will be transferred through the bridge to Magento. The input-fields here are disabled on purpose.
The tab Event Forwarding allows you to enable certain events to be forwarded through the bridge. We do not recommend enabling all events, because this will downgrade your performance dramatically. However, we recommend the following events to be enabled:
- address_save_after
- adminhtml_customer_save_after
- customer_save_after
If you want Joomla! users to be deleted as soon as the corresponding Magento customer is removed, you need to enable the following events as well:
- adminhtml_customer_delete_after
- customer_delete_after
Other events may need to be enabled, depending on extra MageBridge plugins existing in Joomla! - for instance, the integration with Community Builder will require you to enable extra events.
Tutorials on MageBridge basics
Tutorials on MageBridge administration
