Integrate Zen into Joomla

[RtX]

I would be up for helping. I am not a coder but will do whatever I can do - testing, documentation etc.
RtX

[greyman56]

OK, here are some of my thoughts so far. Lets talk this through and see if it is worth doing in the community. I am not hawking for work, by the way. I am quite busy enough at present and the pipeline has plenty coming. So I am more looking for coding or technical help than funding. I would rather a team of two or three (myself included) get involved and make this happen for our respective businesses and the community. I get a faster learning curve into the guts of the two applications, the project gets a help along with some funded as well as freely given time of mine, and the community gets something that seems to be desired.

Should we be talking to the Joomla forums as well on this? Any pros and cons that I should be aware of?

An open source integration will allow each user of us the opportunity to customise it to each customer's need. I see there being several "levels" of integration that various people would require.

Levels of integration would be:
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1/ Template integration - the basic look of the site.
I am not sure how easy this would be to do. I have seen some posts about matching stylesheets from Joomla to ZenCart and vice-a-versa and it has been problematic for some. Seems that matching Joomla to a ZenCart template is easier. I have custom templated both now, and the Joomla index.php style template is indeed compact and fully stylesheet controlled, but I found it more difficult to get a particular 3 column layout that adjusted well to 2 columns when column 3 was removed. I ended up using tables more than I would have liked to achieve the goal. This was easier to achieve in ZenCart and after adapting the classic template to look like the Joomla site, realised I could use much of that code on a replacement Joomla template.

So we would probably want to produce a "classic" template that would be usable on both ZenCart and Joomla. I think this is do-able. Or at least write a "howto" document for the wiki.

My potential client would probably fund this level as it will be important to him.

2/ Single sign on - same username / password for each system.
From my knowledge so far, using the ZenCart "customer" login as the central authentication database would be the easiest way to go. The Joomla authentication plug-in system looks fairly easy to use and I suspect that would make the most sense. Then if someone created a ZenCart login (at purchase) then they would automatically have a Joomla login.

I would guess that if we ONLY used the ZenCart customer login database in Joomla then any Joomla created logins would also be available in ZenCart.

Would we want to be able to use other Authentication plugins in Joomla too? And would we want them available in ZenCart? Not sure about these questions just yet. Can anyone shed light on possible plugins for ZenCart to match the Joomla ones?

3/ Session management - making the integration appear seamless.
Single sign on makes username and password pairs available in each application, but the user still needs to sign in to each application separately. Joining the sessions, or creating both sessions each time someone signs in, would make the experience fairly seamless to the customer.

I have seen some work by yellow1912 called "Zen Bridge" (see http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95643) that seems to use ZenCart code to do the logging in. I have not yet tried this, but it certainly might provide insight into how they can be joined in a way that matches the customer's expectations. And this also covers 2/ above to some extent although a custom plug-in in Joomla would probably be better.

4/ On the integrated admin side, I think that all we really need is a menu item in each application that jumps between each admin interface. Handling username / password issues here is still a mystery to me as I have not had a look at the code at all on that side. I also have not had the time to consider the admin / editing functionality in both applications enough to see a clean merging. Perhaps only a session / username / password integration is all that is ultimately needed. Or perhaps the work needed to achieve this is not worth it. Perhaps they can just stay separate.

Any thoughts on this?

5/ Menu systems
I am hoping that the template integration can handle this issue. But if it may not because one application can set what style of menu happens and the other would not know about the change. Full integration would involve admin integration and probably additional functionality in ZenCart to allow some of the menu stuff in Joomla.

We could handle this by providing guidelines to making them work in the same manner. For example, set them both to XHTML (using list items) and all will be well. Something like that anyway.

6/ Shared content
All I can say is BIG topic and is it needed? Would we want to be able to include a product from ZenCart inside of the Joomla part of the site? Would we want to display an article from the Joomla side inside the ZenCart part of the site? That might be a cool thing to do, but I would guess it could take too many core changes in both applications and therefore make upgrading a nightmare.

7/ Any others topics I've missed?

I think we will probably need to specify certain limitations once we have a working integration. The available user authentication mechanisms may not all be compatible. And we may even have to limit the choice of session container (DB vs File etc) so they play nicely together. These are two that spring to mind.

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So there are some initial thoughts. I hope we can get some good input into this and the least that will happen is that the ideas documented here will help others attempting to do the same thing.

I must repeat my request for at least one other person with code experience who can at least direct me to certain files and preferably functions. And preferably one with a longer history on here than me.

Look forward to more discussions.

Cheers
Graham

[Kim]

Folks - if you are going to start a new project, then you need to start your own support site.

[greyman56]

Understood Kim.

[puggy]

Has anyone heard anything about connectage?
And has anyone else started to work on this project of a bridge?

[puggy]

Opps Double posted

[greyman56]

Originally Posted by puggy

And has anyone else started to work on this project of a bridge?

We will be doing some integration of the 2 applications over time as we see it as an important facility to offer our customers.
Unless, of course, connectage or some other commercial project comes out and it provides features that our customers want and are prepared to pay for.
Or else another open source bridge project starts up and then we would probably join them.

Without another coder that knows their way around zen and/or joomla joining in, we will take several months to get a beta going I would think. And the feature set and timeframe will depend in part on our own customer's demand rather than the needs of this community.

That being said, we are discussing the prospective client's needs early next week and that will tell us if we need to fast track the project or not. If we need to move quicker than we currently expect, then we will be actively seeking help in the developer forums of both applications and setting up a sourceforge project to kick it off.

But we will certainly be sharing some or all of it with the communities once we achieve something. even if that is only single sign on, which to me is the minimum requirement.

Cheers
Graham

[puggy]

Think it over last night I was wonder which would be an easier task figure out how to bridge zen to joomla or joomla to zen

There are bridges for Zen and phpBB and there are bridges for Joomla and phpBB. I was wondering if we could combine the 2 bridges some how to a common component or app it should be easy right?

[rued]

Hi all,

I see you're planning to make another integration project for Joomla!, so I just want to share some knowledge about this.

There is a integration project for Joomla! running, who makes it possible to connect to different systems without core hacks on them. And I think that the developer could include Zen Cart into it, if we in the Zen Cart community steps in and gives our share in his fund raise (I already did ;)).

Take a look at jfusion.org, give him some financial help, and add your wishes for your integration to Zen Cart in the project forum - jfusion.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=584

[greyman56]

Originally Posted by rued

There is a integration project for Joomla! running, who makes it possible to connect to different systems without core hacks on them. And I think that the developer could include Zen Cart into it, if we in the Zen Cart community steps in and gives our share in his fund raise (I already did ;)).

Take a look at jfusion.org, give him some financial help, and add your wishes for your integration to Zen Cart in the project forum - jfusion.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=584

Thanks Rued,

This is a very promising looking project. We will be investigating it more with the intention of contributing.

It seems to only work one way though. For example, log into Zen Cart when logging into Joomla. Not in reverse. However, I noticed that there is a early release osCommerce plugin for it, which probably will easily port across to Zen Cart, or at least provide some ideas to give us a start. And that would get the Joomla->Zen direction covered. Hopefully fairly easily.

Once that part is done, then we can work on the Zen->Joomla direction so that users logging into Zen will get logged into Joomla automatically too.

I will take this part up on the Zen Cart Contributors forum to see how easy that part may be. Is that the best forum for such questions?

Cheers
Graham