From Magento Community to Magento Enterprise
Friday, 24 September 2010Not too many customers will take this step, but still it's an interesting scenario: How to migrate from a Magento Community Edition site to a Magento Enterprise site? Apart from the increase in licensing costs, there are some other things to keep in mind as well.
Change of Magento theme
One of the major changes would be the change of Magento theming. Most shops are based on parent/child theming, meaning that their own specific changes are applied on top of a default called the parent theme. A default Magento setup includes more than 1000 PHTML-templates and a lot of XML-layout stuff, and building all that from scratch would require a lot of work.
Instead, it's much easier to setup a child-theme based on the original, and only include those files that require change. Because the HTML-code is still fully customizable, setting up an unique design is still perfectly possible with this parent/child theming concept. But with Magento Enterprise, you might want to change the parent from being the community-default to the enterprise-default. And this almost means starting from scratch.
Different functionality
One of the reasons to switch over to Magento Enterprise might be the introduction of new features like Gift Card Certificates and Private Sales (and Catalog Events). These new features require layout changes and this means modifications of both XML-layouts as PHTML-templates. On the XML-level chances are that the changes only involve a couple of lines of code, but the PHTML-templates need complete reviewing.
Migrating from Magento Community to Magento Enterprise is perfectly possible, and looking at the migraton on the database-level it's peanuts. The real work is put into the re-design of the Magento theme.