History of MageBridge

MageBridge was developed in 2009 to fill in the e-commerce gap that existed in Joomla! back then. Magento was growing rapidly, and while many were eager to make the move to Magento, the complexity of the Magento theming system stopped many. With MageBridge, Yireo was able to offer Joomla! developers an easier way of implementing Magento - reusing Magentos e-commerce features, while using Joomla! templating power to style the shop. This proved to be a great success.

MageBridge has always been open source. The source code was shared with customers who subscribed to a MageBridge Support Subscription, but also the source code was shared on a Subversion server for the world to use. The Subversion server however also contained all the sources for Joomla! and Magento, making it easy to implement MageBridge from scratch, but making it hard to implement MageBridge on existing Joomla! and Magento sites. With the GitHub move this is changed.

Moving forward with GitHub

A public GitHub repostitory now gives you access to the MageBridge Core extensions, including a Joomla! component, various Joomla! plugins and Joomla! modules and a Magento module, which can be simply copied to your existing site and installed (discovered) there. While previously changes in MageBridge were periodically copied from a private Yireo SVN repository to the public Yireo SVN repository, work is now directly done on GitHub. Any improvement that Yireo makes is instantly shared with the community.

The link for the MageBridge Open Core repository is:

https://github.com/yireo/MageBridgeCore

We hope to write documentation soon for best practices on using these sources. 

Is all of MageBridge now on GitHub?

No, not everything. We have choosen to put everything you need to integrate Magento into Joomla! (and vice versa) on GitHub. But some advanced features like additional Product Plugins, Newsletter Plugins and Store Plugins are only available on a subscription base. This means that if you want to bridge things, no charge is asked, but if you want to experience the full marketing power of MageBridge, a small investment is needed.

Is MageBridge free now?

MageBridge has always been free. Free as in freedom, because the license was always open source. Free as in free beer, because the sources were out there on our Yireo SVN server. Nothing has changed regarding the word "free". However, with this move to GitHub we are making it a lot easier for others to contribute to MageBridge, and in exchange for that, we are making it easier for others to use MageBridge.

We are investing still a huge amount of time in maintaining and improving MageBridge. MageBridge makes your life with Magento a lot better, but Magento is still complex, and therefor issues might arise with MageBridge as well. We are sharing the sources of MageBridge with the community, but support is not available for free. For users in need of professional support, MageBridge Support Subscriptions are available.

Checkout the sources on GitHub.