It’s been quite some time since the last time we updated anything about TypoGento. On behalf of the whole TypoGento team I’d like to apologize for not being able to publish anything within the last couple of months. For quite some months now Magento has been stuffing our schedules now. We’re still convinced Magento is the best E-Commerce system around and that’s why we need TypoGento to be around for quite some more time.

We’re currently working on a new version 0.6 which will be compatible with the current Magento versions. Additionally we’re planning to develop a first stable final version of TypoGento until Meet Magento #2 in the beginning of November. If you have features that need to be in there - let us know.

Additionally we have been thinking about a global search mechanism that indexes TYPO3 pages and contents as well as Magento shop articles. Basically there are two possibilities: Use TYPO3 based standard search engine “Indexed Search” or the Magento search engine. What do you guys think? Which option would be the better choice? Any more options?

Thanks for anybody supporting us with advices about how to make TypoGento compatible again. We really appreciate this.

Varien just published Magento 1.3.0 this morning. After testing the TypoGento functionality we just adapted the router to the new version. Additionally we added a correct implementation of the ACT menu state of the TYPO3 HMENU for Magento categories. The current version can only be run with version 1.3.0 of Magento.

We tested it once in a development site and it seemed to work out perfectly. Still, we recommend to not upgrade on a live site directly - like Varien recommends to have an upgrade test before live upgrading Magento to 1.3.0. We’re trying to get some more feedback from upgraders within the next days. If you upgraded and everything works out great - please post us a message. If you should find errors, please drop us a line as well or post it to the bug tracker. Thanks a lot.

The extension can be found at http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/693/typogento. Have fun using it.

A few weeks ago the bicycle vendor Bianchi launched a TypoGento shop for bike accessories. Bianchi is a world-famous bicycle manufacturer founded in 1885 that is considered one of the most prestigious brand names in racing bicycles. The existing TYPO3 web site for the US American market was enhanced to offer shop functionality. Have your own look at the website and the shop at http://www.bianchiusa.com.

Marc Infield (Infield Design) and Michelle Trevino (TEK Development) successfully realised the TypoGento integration even on an earlier beta version. The TypoGento core team had a minor bug fixing session on the live instance to get rid of a bug in the user’s account management.

Afterwards Mr. Infield sent us a brief review of their experiences in the implementation of TypoGento:

Overall this is a killer piece of software. It offers an e-commerce solution worthy of Typo3. This is a combination that we have been waiting for.

From the administrators perspective Typogento is great. It makes connecting Typo3 and Magento easy. It follows both the Typo3 and Magento interface conventions making it intuitive to configure and administer for anyone familiar with the systems. It’s also nice that you have the option to use the product list or the single view option. We haven’t configured the single view yet but hope to use it in the future as a product widget on Typo3 content pages. Again its clean Typo3 implementation makes it straight forward to manage.

Things that would be nice:

• SEO - Have an option to pass meta tag information from Magento to Typo3.
• Group Management - Changing a user’s group could give access to both secure pages in Typo3 and tiered pricing in Magento

First of all we’d like to thank you for using TypoGento. This successful implementation hopefully takes away the fear of some companies out there that would like to integrate those wonderful products TYPO3 and Magento. You guys showed how easy it is to implement the whole shop integration without any help from us. Additionally, we really appreciate your feedback and the open points that also were on our internal to-do-list. We promise to care about the points given to make TypoGento an even better integration solution in future releases.

We are proud to announce the new TypoGento release has just been published!

The following features have been added:

• it is now possible to have special pages for cart, checkout, account etc. and it is possible to configure the links to these pages using TypoScript.
• you are now able to deactivate Magento stores. You can decide which storeviews of your Magento instance are to be accessable directly through Magento. You can also choose to disable those views only for a certain kind of agent - for example an iPhone/iPod version might still be available through Magento.
• Redirects are now supported which is very important for payment providers like PayPal.
• The routing process has been changed to reenable the Magento Style controller rewriting possibilities.
• The base url security check of Magento has been changed to consider TYPO3 URLs as secure.
• Earlier versions needed to have TYPO3 database available to write users into TYPO3 database. You can now choose whether you want Magento users to be written into TYPO3 or not.
• TYPO3 can now use the Magento titles, next versions will also include meta information.

We have also fixed some major and minor bugs. All those improvements have been made possible because of the chance to test the application in production environments. Up to now there are two live sites that use TypoGento - for example http://www.biestmilch.com/store - we’re planning to have blog posts about those live sites soon and of course there will be more of them. The documentation will be updated within the next days.

We consider this to be the last beta release of TypoGento. We have two more sites coming within the next couple of weeks (including the one I mentioned at Meet Magento in Leipzig). After that we feel every case should have been tested. If you have your own TypoGento running and face major or minor bugs, feel free to register to our bug tracker and report your problems.

Thanks for all your support and motivation. You encourage us to make TypoGento the best integration solution for TYPO3 and Magento!