About product connectors

For those of you not familiar with MageBridge Product Connectors: These are a MageBridge-specific extension-type (so not a plugin, not a component, not a module, but a connector), which allow you to trigger something when a Magento product is sold. For instance, if the Magento product is actually a virtual dummy, you can sell memberships, download-access, etcetera. But you can also optimize after-sales by subscribing the user who made the purchase to a post-sales usergroup (customer segmentation), or subscribe that customer to a product-specific newsletter.

Not product connectors, but newsletter connectors

Magento also has its own newsletter functionality, but it lacks many of the features offered by dozens of Joomla! newsletter-extensions. The product-connectors sound like a cool replacement, but actually they are not: They are triggered only when a product is sold, but not when the newsletter-checkbox is checked within the Magento checkout or when a customer modifies its newsletter-settings under its own account.

These shortcomings asked for a new connector-type. But when thinking things over, we came to the conclusion that we might just as well use the Joomla! plugin-architecture for this. Therefor, a new plugin-group "magebridge.newsletter" has been created. Plugins of this type can call upon the event onNewsletterSubScribe (with arguments $user and $state) to subscribe a Joomla! user to their specific system.

The power of event forwarding

With MageBridge, connecting Magento logic to Joomla! logic is made simple by using the events-mechanism available in both applications (Magento observers and Joomla! plugins). A Magento event can be forwarded using MageBridge to Joomla! to become a Joomla! event. This architecture made it fairly easy to implement a Magento observer listening to newsletter-events in Magento, forward them over the bridge, and call upon specific Joomla! plugin-events. Part of the new MageBridge 2.0 approach will be to heavily document this approach for other developers.

Migrating existing connectors to plugins

All product-connectors that are actually connecting to Joomla! newsletter-extensions will be migrated to this new plugin-architecture in August / September 2012. After that, we will work also on migrating the entire product-connector technology to Joomla! plugins instead.