While attempting integration of one CMS with another, some simple principles should be remembered. For all integration attempts, you have to consider the following aspects:
- Master-slave relationship: While integrating one CMS with the other, one of the applications act as the master and the other as the slave. If you integrate application A to application B, then application B will be considered as master. Master applications maintain authentication and sessions for both applications. While integrating Zen Cart with some other CMS, first consider whether Zen Cart will be the master or the slave. If you are integrating Zen Cart with an existing website, Zen Cart is going to be the slave. On the other hand, when you are adding blogging functionality to the Zen Cart shop by integrating WordPress with Zen Cart, Zen Cart is going to be the master.
- User and Group Management: One purpose of integrating two CMSs is to have a common user and group management system. Zen Cart integration may be tight, where both Zen Cart and an other CMS will use the same database for user and group management. On the other hand, loose integration will allow periodic or event-based synchronization of user or group databases. Tight integration becomes easier when both CMSs use the same type of user database. If the user databases are very different from each other, then tight integration may not be possible and some sort of fallback solution such as synchronizing the databases may be used.
- Visual integration: Users see the integration only through the visual integration. In fact, visual integration should be such that users will be unaware of integration attempt. While integrating the two CMSs, the visual template of the master should preferably be used for both CMSs. However, using a master’s template system is difficult and a central template system should be developed which can be used for both applications.
This article has been extracted from: Zen Cart: E-commerce Application Development
A step-by-step developer’s guide
- Install, configure, and customize Zen Cart for your customers
- Enhance and modify Zen Cart
- Walk through the creation of a fully functional book store
- Learn advanced features of Zen Cart with practical examples
For more information, please visit:
http://www.PacktPub.com/zen-cart-ecommerce-application-development/book