Joomla and Magento. To integrate or not.

There’s been a lot of talk of the new ecommerce platform, Magento. I must say, it’s one sexy platform. Without doubt, Magento will be the leader in open source commerce, if it isn’t already. Packaged with all the bells and whistles, this SEO-ready platform has released it’s first stable version with force.

Magento already has a substantial following. Without doubt, we’ll start seeing the Magento template shops start popping onto the seen. Many Magento-Junkies come from a Joomla-based background and seem eager to get their hands on the feature rich, best-of-breed ecommerce platform. Most, if not all, have one thing in mind: to develop, hack, extend, modify and integrate.

Joomla 1.5 was recently released. Since mid ‘07, lot’s of excited developers have been talking about the integration of Joomla! and Magento. Exciting talk… kind of. My initial response was definitely positive. I even considered getting involved. I soon began to realize that this is quite the headache for something that may not make much sense.

There’s a few hurdles to jump with this initiative.

• Licensing: Huge concerns with licensing. The bottom line is that Magento and Joomla! are not compatible. In a nutshell, this simply means it’s just not gonna happen. “The Open Software License is a free software license. It is incompatible with the GNU GPL in several ways.”
  
• SEO – Another substantial concern would be SEO. Assuming the platforms were integrated, what kind of headache would be realized in terms of SEO?
• Bridging – At this point, this form of integration seems to be the only choice. Creating a bridge to “integrate” Joomla and Magento isn’t an option in my book. Unless you have a solid, fully integrated system I won’t bother. Simply put, there’s no point… Unless you’re goal is to create a skitzo-site. The two platforms are rich in differences and will undoubtedly reflect on the UI.
• Practicality. Let’s think about this…. How practical, and feasible would it be to integrate the two platforms? What functionality would you obtain only with a Joomla/Magento integration? Unless you’re planning on selling a line of t-shirts on your fee-membership cms, there’s really not much of a need.

The integration between platforms may prove to be a possible and powerful super-duo. But for now, options are minimal and lowsy at best. Don’t get me wrong… I’d love to be proved wrong on this one. The open source community is big, so maybe somebody out in Nepal will build a freely available perfect solution. Until then, I’ve started hearing good things about full integration with Freeway and Joomla.

For those of you who want to give it a ‘go,’ look at JFusion. They claim to have the integration working. With the new release of Magento, I wasn’t successful with the integration.

On a positive note, it’s amazing how many people get involved. Developers of all walks of life and from all over the world take time to contribute, for free. Magento and Joomla! are both extremely powerful systems… Integrating the two would certainly be a great boost for each. And who knows… this hybrid beast might be available sooner than we think.

Additional Resources:

• JFusion
• Joomla! Forums on the topic
• Magento Forums on the topic
• Licensing conflicts

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Tags: ecommerce, Extensions, Joomla, Magento, seo