Migrate to Magento using Vm2Mage and MageBridge
Friday, 18 March 2011With MageBridge, you can easily integrate Magento into Joomla!. With Vm2Mage, you can migrate from VirtueMart to Magento. Both extensions offer an excellent way to forget about the struggle with VirtueMart and start fresh with an easier version of Magento.
Why use a CMS when it's really about the shop?
A common question asked by Magento experts is why an integration between Joomla! and Magento is needed in the first place? Magento already offers CMS-features and a webshop should be about it's shopping features. While this sounds completely logical, the same experts will also point out that any good shop needs help-pages, FAQ, feedback forms, etcetera. For all this, you will need heavy customization in Magento, while it is actually the main feature of Joomla!: Managing the content to guide your customers.
More than just a CMS
With MageBridge, things are far more simple. If you want a FAQ-section, you simply click together a menu from within the Joomla! Administrator and point a new Menu-Item to some kind of content-category. Optionally, there are dozens of third party Joomla! extensions offering FAQ-functionlity. The same applies for forms, tutorial-pages, guestbooks. Things that require technical knowledge (or even programming skills) in Magento, are easy as hell in Joomla!.
Therefor, Joomla! is more than just a CMS, it's a site-building tool as well. The powerful aspect of MageBridge is that it introduces Magento logic to the site-building capabilities of Joomla!. It's far more than just a bridge, it's an entire new way of dealing with Magento.
Migrate from Joomla! to Magento - but not entirely
So it makes sense to combine Magento with a real CMS like Joomla!. When you're coming from Joomla!, this will make even more sense: When migrating from a shopping component like VirtueMart, you will want to migrate all your products and orders. But all other things like the template, the content and menu-structures, extra extensions, will need to be migrated as well if you're choosing to migrate to a stand-alone Magento site ...
Unless you choose for MageBridge: With MageBridge, the entire Joomla! site might remain intact. It's just the VirtueMart data that needs to be migrated to Magento: And we provide the excellent tool Vm2Mage for that as well.