Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

Upgrading Magento, Joomla! and MageBridge

Upgrading MageBridge 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! and Magento. Here are our recommendations.

Upgrading Joomla!

Joomla! has no automatic upgrade procedure. Files need to be patched manually, which means you need file-access to your webserver (through SSH or FTP) and you need to make sure the file-permissions remain correct. Before you start, make sure you have a correct backup of both files as database. Also make sure you know how to restore this backup.

Joomla! uses major and minor versions. The current major version is Joomla! 1.5 which is the version MageBridge was designed for. Minor versions are indicated with a third number (for instance 1.5.12). The theory here is that minor versions do not include new architectural features, but mostly contain fixes for bugs or security issues.

We recommend upgrading your Joomla! website as soon as a new release becomes available. Our experience is that the Joomla! API itself does not change that frequently, so there's a very good chance MageBridge is still functioning as it should after upgrading Joomla!. However, if you want to be on the safe side, upgrade Joomla! first in a testing environment before upgrading the production environment.

With one MageBridge license you can configure multiple domains, so with one license you can serve both your production-sites as your testing-sites. Do not change the domain-information in your Yireo account just for this sake, because we might misinterpret your regular altering of licensed domains as abuse.

Upgrading Magento

When upgrading Magento, a good backup is needed as well. Upgrading is a lot easier than with Joomla!. With Joomla! you need to patch files on the file-level. With Magento you can just use the Magento Connect application (also called the Magento downloader) to do this for you.

But, though it sounds very easy to upgrade Magento, we strongly advice you to not upgrade your production environment until you have tested this completely. Magento has a habit of changing their API on a regular basis, and if this causes conflicts with MageBridge, you might be left with a corrupt installation. We urge you to setup of testing environment to test any upgrade before putting it into production. Also, always have a complete backup available and make sure you understand the procedure of restoring this backup in case of emergency.

Still, we recommend upgrading your Magento-site regularly. We will test MageBridge with older versions on a regular basis, but will try to keep ahead with new opportunities offered by new Magento versions.

Upgrading the MageBridge extension

Upgrading MageBridge is easy and straight-forward. Within Joomla! or within Magento, you can browse to the Updates-page of MageBridge and click on upgrades. Our aim is to have a quick release schedule - updates are made available very soon after bugs arise. It is our recommendation to always stay up-to-date with MageBridge.

If you want to make a backup of your settings, you can use a tool like phpMyAdmin to make a database-backup of the Joomla! table "jos_magebridge_config". Settings in Magento are saved in the Magento table "core_config_data".

When upgrading Magento or upgrading Joomla!, it might be wise to check our website for any news regarding compatibility with MageBridge. On the Yireo Forum we will post our test-results. Also if you run into problems, post your problems and we will help you out as soon as possible.

When you are using the Magento Compiler, you should ofcourse disable the Magento Compiler before making any changes to your environment. See your Magento documentation for how the compiler should disabled and enabled.

Patching MageBridge files

As an alternative to the upgrade-mechanism above, you can also download patch-files from within the Downloads-section of your Yireo Account. You can extract the patch-archives and copy the files over your current installation in either Joomla! or Magento. In Magento, this works flawlessly. In Joomla! 1.5, it is not possible to execute database queries when upgrading using patches - therefor we do not recommend using the file-patch for Joomla! as sole method. In Joomla! 1.6, you can rediscover the MageBridge extensions using the Joomla! Installation Manager.

Setting the site offline

The MageBridge settings in Joomla! include an option to set the bridge offline. For instance, when you're upgrading the Magento application it could be a smart idea to disable the bridge temporarily. Note that setting the bridge offline also disables the API-widgets. The settings also include an offline-message, which is displayed instead of the regular component-content.

The offline-setting disables the bridge entirely. All extensions that use the bridge (components, modules, plugins) are returned an empty result. Only the MageBridge component displays an offline message. The modules are left empty. Because the plugins also stop working, please make sure the Joomla! authentication plugin is enabled. This makes sure you can still login using Joomla! credentials. If you're unable to login entirely and need to switch on the bridge again, you can modify the Joomla! database-table "jos_magebridge_config" and set the record with name "offline" to 1.

If you want to customize the HTML of the offline-message, you can do so by creating an output override. You can copy the file components/com_magebridge/views/offline/tmpl/default.php to a file html/com_magebridge/offline/default.php in your template-directory. When Joomla! loads, it will use your template-copy instead of the original file. You can modify default.php to your needs, without loosing the ability to upgrade.