Announcing a VirtueMart-to-Magento migration tool
Wednesday, 14 October 2009Last months we of Yireo have been working hard on MageBridge, which allows the integration of Magento without Joomla!, and the architecture has matured much over this period. Because the bridge itself is stable and its connector-architecure allows for easy extension, we are moving our focus on other areas that come into mind when combining Joomla! and Magento.
One of these areas is the migration of VirtueMart webshops to Magento webshops. Because there are many people switching from VM to Magento, there's no doubt a need for this. But so far a full-service solution was unavailable. Because we needed a solution for this to help a couple of our own customers, we started building a tool our own - Vm2Mage.
While our own goal was to migrate VirtueMart-data to Magento just for the purpose of setting up a MageBridge-based site, we also felt we should bring this tool to a broader public, by making it work also without MageBridge. So the new migration tool works stand-alone, and does not depend on any other software except VirtueMart and Magento.
We call it Vm2Mage
Currently we are still developing this tool, so there's nothing to show you yet. But we can already say you that as of yet the core features are working nicely: Vm2Mage allows you to migrate VirtueMart-data to Magento by browsing to the Vm2Mage component in Joomla! and just hit the "Migrate" button. Next, Vm2Mage will use AJAX to migrate one entity (product, category, product) at the time. The API-protocol being used here to communicate between Joomla! and Magento is XML-RPC.
Each time a product or category is being migrated, it's status is also logged. So if you want to pause the migration, you can. The migration will just restart the migration of the latest product in the list. You can restart the entire migration if your site had some features updated. By default, Vm2Mage will just update the Magento product with the same SKU as the VirtueMart product, but alternatively you can just delete the Magento product to create it as new.
Migrating all data
Important to note is that we will try to migrate all(!) vital VirtueMart information. Our main scenario is that if you want to migrate a shop with 10.000 products, and you have to make a manual change to every products, this will become an exhausting task. Instead, the Vm2Mage software should be able to handle this. We are still thinking about some kind of plugin system to allow you to program your own custom migration-steps.
Migrating custom attributes is also part of our plans. This is still very much in development: Parsing custom attributes from VirtueMart is not so much the problem, but we are facing more difficulties with using the attributes in Magento: Should custom attributes be just custom attributes to the Simple Product, or should we support more product-types? Are custom attributes just custom attributes or do they need to be part of a new attribute-set? We are hoping to design this as solid as possible.
Transferring product images
Something that is already working like a charm is the migration of product images. Once a product has been created in Magento, the Vm2Mage module in Magento will also try to download the product-image from Joomla! and save it in the Magento media-folder. A MD5-checksum is performed to make sure the image in Magento is the same images as in VirtueMart.
More about Vm2Mage coming soon
More information on licensing, pricing and features will be available soon. We are working hard to get a beta-version ready, but are still doubting on which details of information to migrate and which not.
Vm2Mage will be commercial but the price will be relatively low. Also, we will not restrict usage on the number of domains or the number of migrations. You pay for getting the source code and for getting support. MageBridge customers will get the Vm2Mage tool for free.