Magento Ecommerce For Joomla!

[da8iwr]

Same here elfanjo i never heard of it either

So will this be a standalone system that will be bridged to Joomla, or an installer that will completely install in to Joomla.

Also i notice from the Road map of your site, that it is referring to osCommerce a lot, is your system a forked project?
http://www.openfreeway.org/roadmap.html

Nov 2005 - osCommerce 2.2.3 additions
Mar 2007 - osCommerce tidy ups

Thanks for joining
Ian

[Damian Hickey]

Hi there,

We started work on Freeway four years ago. Yes, it is a fork from osCommerce but you will not immediately notice this.

I better continue my reply in the post about the Freeway extensions: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,249056.0.html

Cheers,

Damian

[mariusvr]

The next version of JFusion will also work with non-forum type softwares, so why not write a Magento plugin for JFusion?

It won't handle "full visual type integrations", such as the discontinued Joomla-SMF bridge to remain compliant with the GPL license, but  that can be overcome by manually matching the CSS templates. JFusion will allow user to use the same username/passwords between different softwares. Even automatic dual login can be supported (by coding in cookie generation).

I am completely tied down with upgrading the current framework at the moment and therefore will need someone else to code the JFusion plugin (you will have a code template to modify to make it specific for magento).

Cheers,Marius

[dax702]

I notice that JFusion is not written to support Joomla 1.0.x.  From a business standpoint, if Magento wants to be widely accepted by the Joomla community (and chooses to utilize this JFusion product) there are many many stores that will not be wanting to upgrade to Joomla 1.5 as soon as it comes out.. Hence, I firmly believe that either JFusion needs to be written for Joomla 1.0.x or Magento should find another way to integrate if they're interested in wide usage by the majority of Joomla users.

[mariusvr]

I notice that JFusion is not written to support Joomla 1.0.x.  From a business standpoint, if Magento wants to be widely accepted by the Joomla community (and chooses to utilize this JFusion product) there are many many stores that will not be wanting to upgrade to Joomla 1.5 as soon as it comes out.. Hence, I firmly believe that either JFusion needs to be written for Joomla 1.0.x or Magento should find another way to integrate if they're interested in wide usage by the majority of Joomla users.

JFusion is only possible because of the beautiful Joomla 1.5 framework and therefore JFusion will never be released for Joomla 1.0.x

Writing core hacks for Joomla 1.0.x is time consuming and problematic if upgrades need to be made to either Joomla or Magento. From a business standpoint, I doubt that people want to invest in a Joomla 1.0.x - Magento bridge because of these problems.

Joomla 1.5 is the future and is already in its RC4 release. People will upgrade as long as there is something in it for them, in my opinion.

Cheers, Marius

[dax702]

I understand what you're saying (not a coder so I don't understand the particulars). But based on the number of current websites that are using Joomla 1.0 with Virtuemart and a number of other 1.0 extensions, I don't believe that these business websites would upgrade to 1.5 just to use something like Magento (especially if there are no 1.5 version of other extensions they currently use)  Not saying that Magento should not use JFusion for integration, I'm just saying that they're not going to get the onslaught of users they're expecting if people can only use their shopping cart with Joomla 1.5.

[AmyStephen]

Well said, Marius. Agree 100%.

[dax702]

Yes, "people" will upgrade to 1.5.  But well established businesses that went to Joomla in the first place because it was easy to set up, and easy to do a multitude of things because of extensions will not make such a massive upgrade, especially if things like the template they are using is not 1.5 compatible.  I'm talking about the smaller businesses that don't have a full time web developer or budget for custom coding. And there are a LOT of them that are currently using Virtuemart and want something better, but won't throw their site into a tailspin just to get Magento.  If Magento is looking for immediate, widespread acceptance and utilization, they really should do whatever is necessary to integrate with 1.0 as a priority (especially if it's more difficult) and 1.5 subsequently.

[AmyStephen]

Dax702 -

That is three posts in 30 minutes saying the same thing. If you feel compelled to help Magento achieve "immediate, widespread acceptance and utilization" - tell THEM. They are not here. They have not even posted in this thread.

Bear in mind, the licenses between Magento and Joomla! are not compatiable. I've been in their forums and I've seen people get angry with them, too, because of the license they selected. (That's always a nice way to treat a free software developer.  :P )

So, if people want to integrate these applications, it can be done like Marius is doing. Or, you could use Marius software and create a plugin to link Joomla! v 1.5 to Magento. I'll tell you what, plugins are not that difficult in Joomla! v 1.5. Or, you can hire it done.

You could use OpenID and hire someone to implement OpenID into Magento so the two can integrate legally.

If you don't want to spend any money, you, and an endless parade of small businesses without web developers and budgets for custom code can choose freely offered software applications with compatiable licenses, like Joomla! and Freeway, and use those integrations. Those options are open, as well. Yes, sounds like with v 1.0.x, too.

So, there are solutions to your business need.  Why focus on what "could be" or "should be"? At least try looking at what is available or soon will be available. Who knows? Maybe you'll like it?
Amy

[dax702]

AmyStephen, you're wrong. Roy did post in this thread twice. He was actually referred to this thread in their forum if I remember correctly.  In any sense, the argument among many Virtuemart users is that it is lacking in features and they want something better.  Someone in the VM forum said that they didn't hardly have the money to pay for their servers each month.  Well I suggested that they start a ChipIn to achieve a goal and make VM a competitive product again... All I'm doing here is giving sound business advice.  After all, we ARE talking about shopping carts.

[AmyStephen]

OK. I apologize. I did not know anyone from Magenta had posted here. Sound business advice can be very helpful, so, thanks for sharing.

Amy

[mariusvr]

If Magento is looking for immediate, widespread acceptance and utilization, they really should do whatever is necessary to integrate with 1.0 as a priority (especially if it's more difficult) and 1.5 subsequently.

Magento looks like an awesome product and should gain "immediate, widespread acceptance and utilization" without a Joomla bridge anyway. However both Joomla and magento could benefit from a bridge.

If people are switching from VM to magento and are IT dummies, they would have to hire a programmer anyway even if they are running Joomla 1.0.x (they need to transfer all of their products/customers/etc).  So I don't agree with your logic that upgrading to Joomla 1.5 would be a complete turn-off for small businesses.

The practicality is that a bridge for Joomla 1.0.x would be more complex, expensive and hard to maintain. I run a site that bridges Joomla with vbulletin and it is a massive pain each time a security upgrade is needed for either software. (as you don't want major holes in your website). If you are recommending a Joomla 1.0.x core hack to integrate Magento, it will be likely that these small businesses won't be able to perform software upgrades themselves on their system (as these hacks are complex to apply and need to be reapplied for every upgrade). I consider myself pretty handy with IT and I find these software upgrades and reapplying hacks very tricky. Especially since you are thinking of small businesses without a programmer, your proposed Joomla 1.0.x bridge is just not practical!

Whereas it is easy to get a simple user/login integration with JFusion. And once you have the basic's up and running, I am sure that more extensive modules/plugins (such as search plugins, latest product modules, etc) will follow quite quickly.

If there are any volunteers to create the Jfusion plugin for magento, I will be happy to guide them through the process once the next JFusion release is out.

Cheers, Marius

[royrubin]

Hey Guys,

As we've mentioned before, we are VERY interested in integrating Magento with Joomla. This is certainly on our radar and hope this will materialize soon. That said, we look forward to working with volunteers from the Joomla community that are interested in taking this project on.

Please contact me if you are interested.

Roy / Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com

[AmyStephen]

Hi Roy -

Welcome to the Joomla! forums, although it sounds like you have been here, before. 

It is appreciated that you have interest in integrating with Joomla!. It will be a great project and I these applications can co-exist in a way that respects the terms of each license.

If you get lost, have questions, want to know who you should talk to, I might be a good resource for you. I certainly am happy to help you, if I can.

There is obviously a lot of interest, Roy! Take care,
Amy

[royrubin]

Amy,

Thanks for reaching out. I believe there are ways to make the licenses coexist, so its less of a concern for me.

I look forward to working with Joomla Community.

Roy

[mariusvr]

Thanks Roy for your interest in joining the Magento and Joomla communities!!!

I also believe that "bridging" of both products is possible. by respecting each others licenses and uniqueness. This morning I had a play with magento and was blown away by its functions and its amazing looks. My congratulations on creating such a nice open-source product.

Once I release the next version of JFusion, I'll post here some instructions on how to get a JFusion->Magento plugin up and running (which would involve creating some code that compares the entered password with the one stored in the Magento database and a function that would create a magento user with SQL statements).

How do you feel about the possibility of JFusion also generating a magento cookie, in order for users to be logged into both softwares automatically? (since Joomla and Magento will share the same username/password with the JFusion plugin) Or would you prefer that cookie generation was kept in Magento itself?

Thanks again,

Marius
(JFusion developer)

[royrubin]

Marius,

Please PM me your contact details and we can get in touch. I will connect you with our project architect and you guys can discuss the specifics.

Thanks!

Roy

[Hils]

Having been watching Magento with great interest and intending to use it as standalone, it is absolutely exciting to find this thread on Joomla!, my real home!! ... and to find that integration is a possibility. Thank you to everyone who is getting involved in this from me who currently uses Virtuemart with Joomla and OsCommerce.

Hils

[one7media]

I have to say that I agree with dax702.  I'm not a developer, simply an end user, and while it sounds like J! 1.5 will be more flexible for devs and is the new direction for Joomla, I have many clients set up on 1.0.x that I have no interest in updating to 1.5. 

Main reason...lack of extensions.  If I sit with a client and tell them, "Well, you can't do this, that, this, and this anymore, but your estore will be really cool" it isn't going to fly.

IMO, there are way more Joomla! users that are like me than ones who have the time, resources, and knowledge to overhaul their whole ESTABLISHED business online to be able to take advantage of one eCom solution.

With that said, I can appreciate the "If you don't want to, don't do it" theory, but it's obvious that Virtuemart is seriously lacking in many areas (lack of support probably the biggest - big forum with way too many unanswered pleas for help) and the whole Joomla! community is in dire need of a serious alternative.

I've downloaded Magento and it rocks, but like Hils said, "Joomla is my home".  I just can't comprehend why a commercial developer who's capable of developing a Magento clone hasn't done so already.  IMO, a $100+ charge would be more than justified and easily collected.

But then again, what do I know.  I'm just a consumer 

[baijianpeng]

I also support the idea of integrating Magento with Joomla! .

My another idea is, why not make Magento just a native component for Joomla! 1.5 ? They don't need to develop a CMS inside Magento, Joomla! can do this job.

If Magento really need some CMS feature to publish articles, why not turn to a Joomla! component, then Magento can use all these Joomla! extensions!

[bigodines]

is there anyone actually working on this? I would like to give it a try but don't want to reinvent the wheel.

[dax702]

Thanks one7media.  It's definitely true that MOST commercial website owners (I'm talking small businesses that are run out of the home) are not tech savvy and picked Joomla based on its ease of use, along with the vast array of extensions to do just about everything.  If it's not broken, don't fix it.  Well, being that for a business, the shopping cart is the most important element, Virtuemart is broken and needs fixing or another solution.  If Roy wants to make money, he can probably make a lot of it selling a fully integrated Magento ecommerce solution for Joomla 1.0.x at a reasonable price.  He'd instantly pull every disgruntled virtuemart user to Magento and could then use that income to fund development for a 1.5 integration for all the new Joomla users who plan to dive into that. Although, I think he is pretty well funded already with his main business..iJoomla tried to pull that off with their new ecommerce product but it was incredibly premature and lacking in more areas than Virtuemart.  They jumped the gun on their product.

[Jick]

I've been part of a team for 2 years that was building a custom enterprise level e-commerce platform from scratch on the joomla 1.5 engine so I have some experience :-)

In the end we came to the conclusion that if we had to do it again from scratch we wouldn't have build it inside of Joomla but we would have created a standalone shop.

e-commerce is to serious, if it's not just a hobby thing to be wrapped up in your cms system, it just limits and makes managing more complicated.

What I would suggest and would use is a pack of modules and plugins and maybe a catalog component that runs on top of the Magento database. We pulled data in from the backend systems with XML/RPC.
This way you use your Joomla install for promotion, most bought items modules etc etc and leave the real commerce with Magento where it should be and where it will be managed best.

It would be nice to get some more insight into Magento's template system, from what I've seen and did read about it it's much more complicated but powerfull than joomla templates.

Just my 2 cents based on the experience I have with big commerce projects.

Arno

[mariusvr]

is there anyone actually working on this? I would like to give it a try but don't want to reinvent the wheel.

JFusion 1.0.2 was released today and you can use this to write a bridge for Magento. On the jfusion website there is a developers guide, that shows what sort of PHP functions you will need to write. In short, a function that fetched the stored SQL password, a function that encrypts the cleartext password for comparison and a function that populates the Joomla JUser object.

Let me know if someone is interested in developing the JFusion->magento plugin.

Cheers, Marius

[bigodines]

JFusion 1.0.2 was released today and you can use this to write a bridge for Magento. On the jfusion website there is a developers guide, that shows what sort of PHP functions you will need to write. In short, a function that fetched the stored SQL password, a function that encrypts the cleartext password for comparison and a function that populates the Joomla JUser object.

Let me know if someone is interested in developing the JFusion->magento plugin.

Cheers, Marius

I am Marius

I've downloaded JFusion 1.0.2 alpha and I'm doing some tests to learn how the whole process works before creating the plugin. It seems to be the best way to do this integration, nice work though.

[beau]

whoah.

I was very interested in this (Magento) since I just installed VirtueMart and haven't started using it yet -- the problems convinced me to look elsewhere. However, after an hour of trying, I can't get Magento installed, AND it's not officially up and running yet. So then, if I did get this installed, all I could do would be to mess with it - the live version won't come out until at the earliest, March 31. That kind of ruins it for me.

So now i'm on to checking into this Freeway thing.

[da8iwr]

What problems with virtuemart did you get Beau?

As they both require the same sort of hosting space, maybe if your having problems with VM, it maybe causing the same problems with Magento.

Regards
Ian

[beau]

I haven't had any problems with Virtumart yet. But, in reading this one thread, it looks like VM is error prone and lacking support. That makes me nervous right away.

I really like Magento's look - I was in the middle of working on the layout of my site, and checked this forum to see if there were any other options to VM, just to see what's available. Megento appears a lot closer to what I was envisioning, even if it meant a complete departure from Joomla for the particular site I was working on. But, if it's still in Beta, and I can't even get it installed, then I know it's probably going to require more programmer skills than I possess.

I've already got VM installed in the Joomla site, I'm now at the stage of getting it to fit in with my site's design, and trying to figure out how to improve on some of their modules. Like - if a user has done a search for items before, I'd love for the home page to present items similar to their previous searches. I don't know if VM, or Magento or Freeway have those possibilities, so I'd have to build that one myself.

Not trying to derail the thread - I'm just looking for the best eCommerce add-on for my needs.

[Jason]

If you like the standard functions and options of virtuemart, it works.  But if you need it customized, its very difficult.  I have a shopping cart setup and running.  It process orders, etc.  But I have dropped Virtuemart as a product I offer due to its lack of customization.

I've installed magento commerce (it requires a couple server side additions some hosts don't have by default) and its very easy to use and navigate.  I really don't see a lot of extra customization, beyond a template system, for magento.

You could always go with oscommerce or zen-cart for now.  There seems to be ports for these all over the place.  So you could get one of those running for now and then port over in a couple months.

[cpetrauskas]

beau,

I'd like to encourage you to not discount Magento because of a March 31st launch date. In my opinion, the fundamental quality and open-standards extensibility of Magento is far beyond VM and those extra few weeks will fade to irrelevancy if the cart serves you well into the future.

I do agree that there are some tricky parts to getting Magento up on some hosts but once it's up it seems to be solid. There are certainly some PHP and permissions fiddly bits you have to get lined-up first. Good news is they've just switched to a PEAR-based package manger for upgrades so once you get it going the future upgrades are automated. Pretty slick. Their forums have a section dedicated to install support, maybe you could get some guidance there:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewforum/9/

I recently upgraded my PHP and mySQL to the latest and I had no problems with my Magento test install.

One thing I've discovered with Magento that I don't think you get with other carts is that out of the box it seems to embody a rich set of contemporary eCom best practices. I think that this can largely be attributed to the fact that Varien, the creators of Magento, have a history as platform-neutral eCom services contractors long before they had their own horse in the race. It's also my understanding that they did a lot of work with a fork of OS Commerce so they are no strangers to the OS world.

In terms of template customization, Magento has really made an effort to be UI designer friendly. They just added a feature similar to CSSEdit's X-Ray called Template Path Hints that gives you front end visual feedback on what elements are being referred to in the template and CSS.

Good luck with your investigations.

Chris