Migration using Vm2Mage is a breeze
Tuesday, 15 December 2009At the moment we are finalizing a new tool - Vm2Mage - which allows you to migrate VirtueMart-data to Magento. We already discussed some of the features of Vm2Mage in an earlier blog. Using Vm2Mage is simple and effective: Once you have configured the API between Magento and Joomla!, the migration involves nothing more than just hitting the "Migrate" button.
However, the migration could take some time depending on the amount of categories and products you have. We have decided to use an architecture in which Vm2Mage has to open a new connection to Magento for every product, category and customer to migrate. This way, Vm2Mage can safeguard that every entity is saved properly in Magento (including more difficult aspects like attributes and images), while also offering you the possibility to pause and resume the migration at any point.
Software should be there to make your life as system administrator easier. Once you hit the "Migrate" button it's time for a coffee. The AJAX-architecture of Vm2Mage makes sure sessions in both Joomla! as Magento are kept alive. Vm2Mage will keep on creating new products or updating existing products in Magento until the migration is finished or paused.
The fact that Vm2Mage allows to update existing products also bares in the fact that you can make changes to the original VirtueMart product, migrate those changes to Magento while not loosing your newly created Magento product. Of course some values like title and description will be updated again, but this architecture allows you to build up the Magento site with fresh product-data while still running VirtueMart on the production site.