Anyway, you’re not here to read a pathetic review of a brilliant shopping cart, you’re here because you want to integrate a forum/blog CMS into your Magento store. It’s quite surprising that to this day, Magento team hasn’t come up with a single bridge to allow integration of content management systems into its software. Wouldn’t you want your customers to keep coming back? You may not have newer products to sell, but a professionaly managed blog (unlike this one) could at least keep you in the game. This is where integration comes in, and today I will show you how to integrate a forum into your Magento store. The same guide also applies to integrating blogs and other CMS’s.

The choice of software to integrate is limited at this time, and I do not take credit for doing any good. I’m merely restating what has already been said, but in a much more clearer and precise way.

Reference Magento Store: http://www.seawiser.com/home/
Integrated Forum Page: http://www.seawiser.com/home/community/

The power of Integration:
As much as I hate calculus, integration has some good use in real-life. The following 3 scenarios comes to life after successfully following this tutorial.

1. Customers log into Magento, and they are automatically logged into the integrated CMS.
2. Master CMS (Magento in our case) manages user registration and profiling.
3. Customers never leave the site. They access your forum/blog within the premises of Magento.

Nuts and Bolts:
We will mate Magento with the popular content management system, Joomla. Once successfully harrassed, Joomla will give us the power to select from a wide variety of blogging/forum systems for your Magento store. In case you’re wondering why I chose Joomla- it’s easy to integrate thanks to a slick plugin coded by its community. Your Magento installation will not be affected at any point during the intercourse of this tutorial. If you mess up, you can always redo the tutorial without cursing at me.

A Lot of Easy-to-Follow Steps:
1. I’m assuming that you already have Magento running on your server, not that is matters, if you don’t have it installed, just do it now.
2. Head over to Joomla.org and grab yourself a copy of Joomla, version 1.5.x.
3. Extract the installation package you downloaded above, and upload it into a folder on your server. Joomla can reside anywhere on the server as long as it is part of the same domain as Magento.
3a. For the sake of this tutorial, let’s place Joomla inside Magento’s root directory in a folder called ‘forum’ . Your newly created folder will now be among the several folders already present inside your Magento directory.
4. Proceed to install Joomla by pointing your web browser to the above folder.  If you managed to install Magento on your own, Joomla is even easier.
5. Once Joomla is successfully installed, access its front and back ends to make sure everything is in working order.
6. Now head over to  Jfusion.org and download a copy of Jfusion core package.
7. In your Joomla admin panel, select  the option ‘Extensions > Install/Uninstall”.
7a. Under “upload a package”, browse to the Jfusion package on your hard drive, and hit install. Upon a successful install, Joomla will spill a bunch of green lines with some irrelevant text written on them.
8. Go to ‘Components > Jfusion > Joomla options’. This option was not available before.
8a. Leave everything to default, but make sure to fill in “Full URL to Software” to what it actually is. This is the same as in Step-4
8b. Under “Login Identifier”, choose “Email”. Save.
9. You should now have “plugin configuration” opened up in front of you, if not, open it from Jfusion menu. Ignore any errors that show up from now on.
9a. From the listing, click on “configure plugin” for Magento.
9b. Put in the full URL path to your Magento root directory when asked (do not include a trailing “/” at the end)
9c. On the next screen, Jfusion will automatically fetch database values to fill up most of the input fields for you. Keep this page open as we will revisit it shortly.
9d. Now, open a new browser window/tab, and log into your Magento admin. Go to  ‘ System > Web Services > Roles ‘
9e. Create a new role, give it a name of your choice, and assign it “All” resources under “resource roles”. Save
9f. Now go to ‘System > Web Services > Users’. Create a new user by following the steps below.
9g. Make up a “username” and “API”, and keep a note of it. Assign this user a role under “User Role” (the role you created in step-9e). Save user
9h. We are now going to continue from where we left our Jfusion configuration (Step-9c)
9i. Fill in the username and API fields on the configuration page (we made them up in step-9g), and hit Save.
9j. Now, make  joomla_int the “Master” and Magento the nig… er, “Slave” by clicking on the appropriate icons. Ignore any errors.
9k. Revist “Joomla configuration” and “Magento configuration” pages, and without making any changes on them, hit Save. This step assigns users a default group.
10. From the Jfusion menu, click on “Login Checker”. Enter your email address and password that you used for installing Joomla. Now click on “Check Login”
10a. If you have been following all the above steps carefully, the next screen will be free of errors. If not, revist step-9a, and make sure all the fields are correctly filled in.
11. Go back to “plugin configuration” page, and this time, set Magento to “Master” and joomla_int to “Slave”
12. Go to Jfusion control panel (main page). Enable Jfusion, which should have been disabled by default.
13. You have successfully synced Joomla with Magento. Users who sign up for an account on Magento are automatically added into Joomla.
14. Now, head over to Joomla.org and search for blog/forum extensions. I personally prefer “ccboard” forum extension because it’s easy to customize.
15. Download an extension of your choice, and install it the same way as you installed Jfusion. Menu > Extensions >Install/Uninstall.
16. Now, in Joomla admin, go to ‘Menus > Main Menu’. Add a new menu, and from the list, select ccboard (or whatever the extension is called)
17. Make your newly created menu listing “Default”.
18. Done. You can thank me later because the bigger challenge is yet to come.

At this point, sign up a new user in Magento, and keep it logged in. Now visit your Joomla-based forum/blog, and try to login using the same credentials. You should be able log into Joomla as well.

Note: Due to current limitation of Jfusion, users logged into Magento are not logged into Joomla-forum/blog automatically. They will be asked to relogin. There is an extension available that fixes this issue. I believe it is called “reverse double login”, but the author of the extension wants $50 for it. No thanks, I’d rather spend my money on Craplist erotic services.

One Last Very Important Note:
I lied when I said users never leave the site to access your forum/blog, and here is why. You installed Joomla in its own folder, and when you point your browser to it, all you see is a Joomla-styled site, and not your Magento store look-alike. So take some time and style your Joomla templates to resemble those of Magento. Unfortunately, there is no getting out of it. You will most likely run into layout issues, but any experienced web designer can tackle such issues with ease. It took me several hours to truly integrate a forum into Magento. You cannot just copy/paste your Magento templates into Joomla. For instance, the search bar won’t work, and the menus won’t work either (unless you made them custom). Since my store is almost completely custom designed, I didn’t run into a big pile of bullshit. As for the search bar, I replaced it with a look-alike Joomla search bar.

What About Native Magento Forums/Blogs?
There are none available at the time of writing. There is, however, a simple blogging platform for Magento made by LazyMonkey. There is also a Drupal extension for Magento, but I haven’t tried that out.

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From Links to Buttons to Menus: (mouse-over for effects)

Source Code:
Insert the following code into the HEAD section of your HTML document.

<style type="text/css">
/****************** CSS code for Buttons Set 2 ******************/
 
/* DIV container to hold buttons, and set container properties */
#button_holder2 {
	display:block;
	float:left;
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size:15px;
	color:#CCC; 
}
/* Button properties in still mode */	
.btn2 a {
	padding:0 20px;
	float:left; 
	text-decoration:none;
	color: #069;
	font-weight:bold;
	border:1px solid #09C;
}
/* Button properties in dynamic mode (mouse-over) */
.btn2 a:hover {
	color:#fff;
	background-color:#09C;
}
 
</style>

Now place the below code, wherever you want your menu to appear, into the BODY section of your HTML document.

<!-- Buttons set 2 -->
<div id="button_holder2" class="btn2">
    <a href="#">This</a>
    <a href="#">Looks</a>
    <a href="#">Even</a>
    <a href="#">Prettier</a>
</div>

Download full HTML source – contains all 3 menu sets

That was simple, wasn’t it? A functional and elegant web menu without the timeconsuming Flash, Javascript, or Photoshop. Just remember to replace the “#” with links of your choice. The CSS code itself is self-explanatory (see commentary for details)

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