New site Condoom-Anoniem.nl
Monday, 26 April 2010While we develop Magento and Joomla! extensions through Yireo, we also take up the job of building sites for our customers in The Netherlands. One of these sites - Condoom-Anoniem.nl - was brought in production last week and serves as an excellent showcase for MageBridge and Vm2Mage.
The old VirtueMart situation
Condoom-Anoniem.nl sells condoms over the Internet, but delivers its products anonymously and professionally to it's customers. It has also been given various awards due to its fast delivery and excellent support. Just like the organization of Condoom-Anoniem.nl the shop itself needed to be fast and efficient.
The old site was based on Joomla! 1.0 and VirtueMart, but - while Joomla! 1.0 could be migrated to 1.5 - there were some other plans for marketing, which could not be accomplished with VirtueMart. Magento was an obvious choice, and because of the need for content and a smooth migraton, MageBridge was added to the picture.
Vm2Mage migration
Initially the old VirtueMart data were migrated to Magento using Vm2Mage. But after the successful migration of products and categories, it came out that the old setup of attributes was bad and inefficient. Instead all of the products were thrown away and rebuild using a new solid architecture. This made the product-migration of Vm2Mage unneeded.
However, Vm2Mage still did a great job for migrating customer-records (over 50.000 of them). One week before going live, Vm2Mage migrated the great bunch of customer-records to Magento - something that took about 6 hours. But on the actual migration-day, only about 1000 record had changed since, so only those records needed to be migrated. Vm2Mage facilitated this without problems.
Migrating passwords
Passwords were an issue: Vm2Mage is unable to migrate encrypted passwords (duh), but because Joomla! was still being used in the new situation, the equivalent database-tables could be copied and applied to the migrated userbase. To our knowledge, the only efficient way to migrate from Joomla! to Magento while keeping user passwords intact, is to use MageBridge. We will document this in the upcoming weeks.
Dedicated server
The new site runs on a dedicated server. While the website itself is tuned for speed (by minimizing the number of HTTP requests, and compressing everything), the webserver was tuned as well: One of the major gains when optimizing Magento, is to tune the MySQL configuration: The more memory is used, the faster it runs.
The end result is very cool: The MageBridge/Magento site loads fast and the user experience is much better than with the old VirtueMart site. One last performance gain was not put into practice: The use of a CDN - the shops customers are mainly located in The Netherlands, so adding a server in Japan makes no sense.
Money savers
While a new site costs money, one of the goals in this project was to save money by cutting back the amount of work, and not the hourly charge. One of the money savers was the choice for a RocketTheme template and not a custom theme. The Joomla! template only needed simple changes, while the XML-layout of the Magento theme remaind untouched.
Another money saver is the fact that the customer is able to manage its own content: Joomla! allows for easy management of product-menus and content, while Magento is used to manage the catalog. By letting the customer in control, extra time was saved.
Setting up a Magento site takes time and experience, but MageBridge made things certainly easier and the job required much less work. We hope to share the how and why with you all through our upcoming tutorials.