Magento Customization – Integrate Magento into your Joomla! Site
As you know, Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source ecommerce platform, giving you a new perspective on ecommerce and on the first sight itself it will make Joomla!™ ecommerce extensions fade straight into the background.
The administrative backend of Magento is quite complex and also Magento customization. For any application, its feature richness is a desirable asset. However well designed, Magento comes with some drawbacks. So configuring a sophisticated website may take days with Magento development and Magento customization. The operations seems to be effortless in Joomla can be a daunting task from within Magento’s administrator. The template customization in Magento called as Theming by Magento developers is not that easy like in Joomla where you have to squirm your way through dozens of xml, phtml, css files and others in different locations. Magento customization is not that easy as Joomla!
It would be great if we could have all the elaborate functions of Magento cushioned inside the friendly functions of Joomla. For that you have the MageBridge. As the name implies, MageBridge acts as a bridge between Joomla and Magento, consisting of both extensions. Install the extension in both administrators. Now all the Magento’s front end content will feature inside your Joomla site.
Usability
All front end rendering can now be manipulated by Joomla template, while all the Magento’s entire catalogue configuration resides within the Magento back-end administrator.
Magebridge facilitates you to link Shopping cart, Customer Account, Login and Logout and Wish list through the Joomla! Menu Manager. It also supports linking to specific products and categories so you can form the entire user interface through Joomla! and it is an incredible timesaver.
Modules
Magento’s content blocks, featuring similar to Joomla! modules are accessible to Joomla! front end. Magebridge supports with modules and plugins through which all Magento content is accessible to Joomla! In fact there is plugin facility which synchronises Joomla! Users and Magento Account holders. And if you do not need the facility you can switch off individually.
Templates
Templating for a MageBridge website is very easy as it is for any Joomla! site, but there is one drawback. Magento uses ProtoType as its JavaScript framework, but Joomla! uses MooTools. Both are incompatible. The most practical and convenient solution is to simply switch off MooTools from within the MageBridge backend in Joomla since Magento’s shopping cart functionality mainly relies on ProtoType. When developing your template, you must be refrain from adding any MooTools based functionality. And also if you use third party based templates, you have to check that they do not make use of MooTools. It is also good to know that the known third party template that is 100% compatible with Magento is the Gantry driven ‘Quasar’ template by RocketTheme and its sure we will get more such templates.
Learn to swim first
Before diving get prepared first. Even though MageBridge prevents some of Magento’s more practical challenges developing an ecommerce site with MageBridgto needs a lot of planning. It is needed to have some basic knowledge of Magento, Magento themes and Magento customization. Both Magento as well as MageBridge are very well documented and in case of difficulties Magebridge developers’(Yireos) support forum is very responsive.
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