CQUAD stands for CIGNEX Community Commerce Connector. CQUAD aims to capture the best of Drupal and Magento and showcase a package of capabilities for e-commerce website.

Drupal is known for its flexibility, configurability and seamless management of content. Magento provides a robust ecommerce platform with great features of different product types, promotions, different payment method integrations and so on.

The intent of CQUAD is to allow content creation and management in Drupal and view it on Magento front end with products or catalog categories. With CQUAD, the content types are imported into Magento and can be viewed on front end as individual menu items.

CQUAD for first time shows Magento as front end and Drupal as back end. Other Drupal - Magento Connectors so far have used Magento as backend and Drupal as front end. 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.
With CQUAD, the content types are imported into Magento and can be viewed on the frontend as individual menu items.

Installation & configuration Instructions:

• Download and Install CQUAD_Service Drupal module along with soap server - 6.x-1.2-beta1 and Services - 6.x-0.15 from: http://drupal.org/project/cquad_service
• Once the modules are configured, a wsdl will be exposed by Drupal, for example: http://cquaddrupal.cignex.com/services/soap?wsdl
• Install CQUAD Magento module. Once installed, wsdl url will need to be configured. In order to configure on Magento side, browse to Admin Panel > System > Configuration > CIGNEX > Soap client url. Enter the wsdl file and save.
• Click on CQUAD tab in the Magento Admin Panel.  Click on 'Synchronize' button. This will pull all the content types on the Drupal end and also create menu links on Front end Magento.

Magento part of Connector can be accessed at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/cignex/extension/4743/cquad

Further to this contribution, the planned enhancements to CQUAD include:

• Comments, Tagging & Ratings on community content entered using Magento frontend to be stored in Drupal.
• Expose Magento product / catalog categories to Drupal. The current connector does this, but recreates the taxonomy at the time of synchronization. There is no co-relation maintained on which category corresponds to which taxonomy. By maintaining this, it would be easier to fetch content from the Drupal and show it using the Magento frontend.

For further details, please contact mktg@cignex.com