Typogento - Magento TYPO3

The name thing

December 4th, 2008

After Varien published information about TypoGento on the Magento Commerce website a comment came up stating that the name TypoGento does not confirm to the TYPO3 naming conventions. First of all, we are not tied to the given name. Additionally, right now neither the TYPO3 extension nor the Magento module use the name TypoGento at any place.

 

Still we’d like to explain why we called the project itself TypoGento. To be honest, the name came up two hours before leaving to TYPO3 Convention. We needed to prepare an integrated TYPO3-Magento system for demonstration reasons and were looking for an easy name that signals right away from the start what the solution is doing: a 100% pure integration of both worlds.

 

“TypoGento” as a name was obvious to us. Although out there might be products like TypoSphere or TYPOlight or several others, too, to us and the guys around it didn’t seem this could be mistaken. Additionally it sounded a lot better than TYPO3gento which also wouldn’t be accurate because it would not be a 50-50 thing. The only real alternative choice that was discussed was MAGO3 - the same principle in reverse order.

 

That was the story about creating the name TypoGento. As already stated we’re open to proposals from all of you guys out there how to rename the project. If anybody out there has a serious problem with the name and feels harmed because of it, let us know.

Why did we integrate Magento into TYPO3 instead of keeping both applications next to each other?

December 3rd, 2008

As you already might have read on the scenario page, the goal of the TypoGento project was to fully integrate an e-commerce application into an existing TYPO3-managed content web site. Users of the website, maybe a closed group of users, were made to buy products of the given company within the same website.

 

Keeping both applications separately would mean having to exchange different information between them. To explain this a little further we’ll have a look at a little example:

Menus are generated dynamically by TYPO3. Active pages “know” about their siblings and sub pages and menu items are generated context-based. If we wanted to integrate Magento products into the given hierarchy we’d have to pass the current page structure to Magento as well as category or product information to TYPO3. This would add serious complexity to both systems.

 

The solution to this situation is to integrate one application into the other. Magento already offers the opportunity to use external content management functionality but this would neither fit our scenario nor the characteristics of TYPO3. Additionally we can profit from the powerful tools TYPO3 already offers concerning content mangement.