CQUAD stands for CIGNEX Community Commerce Connector. CQUAD aims to capture the best of Drupal and Magento and showcase a package of capabilities for Ecommerce website.
The intent of CQUAD is to allow content creation and management in Drupal and view it on Magento frontend with products or catalog cateogaries. With CQUAD, the content types are imported into Magento and can be viewed on front end as individual menu items.
Drupal is known for its flexibility, configurability and seamless management of content. Magento provides a robust ecommerce plattform with great features of different product types, promotions, different payment method integrations and so on.
CQUAD is unique as it shows Magento as front end and Drupal as back end. Other Drupal-Magento Connectors so far have used Magento as backend and Drupal as frontend. The main issue with this approach is that the robust functionality of Magento with the Entity Attribute model in Database is flattened and hence the whole design of Magento is lost thus giving away the robustness of Magento.
CQUAD has two components to it: CQUAD Magento extension and CQUAD_Service Drupal module.
CQUAD Magento extension can be installed from: www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/cignex/extension/4743/cquad
It's Drupal counterpart can be downloaded from: drupal.org/project/cquad_service
Currently, CQUAD allows to view content on Magento end. The roadmap ahead involves:
- Tagging on community content should be stored in Drupal which will be entered by Magento frontend.
- Comments on community content should be stored in Drupal which will be entered by Magento frontend.
- Expose Magento product/catalog categories into Drupal - The current connector does it, but it recreates a taxonomy whenever sync happens. There is no co-relation maintained that which category corresponds to which taxonomy. If we maintain that, it would be easier to fetch content from the Drupal and show it on Magento.
