First impressions Vm2Mage
Monday, 23 November 2009While we are also working on MageBridge to make it more stable and usable, last weeks we also worked hard on the new VirtueMart-to-Magento migration tool: Vm2Mage. Currently it is possible to migrate products, categories and customers - we are still working on order-migration. Here are already some impressions.
The homepage of Vm2Mage within the Joomla! Administrator gives you some statistics on how far the migration is processed. It also allows you to start a specific migration - the logic is that you need to migrate first all categories, then all products, then all customers and then all orders.
To migrate data, you need to configure the Magento settings first. To begin with you need to enter the URL to Magento, and the API-user and API-key as configured within the Magento Admin Panel. But after the API is up and running, you can easily select settings like "Store" and "Customer Group" through to the use of API-widgets. This concept is also used within MageBridge - the bridge between Joomla! and Magento - but Vm2Mage works completely independant of MageBridge.
Migrating objects is done through a nifty combination of JavaScript, AJAX and XML-RPC. This way you can pause or restart the migration process easily. Also, the techniques used in Vm2Mage allow the migration of large quantities without timeouts. The screenshot shows the migration of about 50.000 customer records through batches of 50 (so with each HTTP-request 50 items are migrated). It took some time - about 5 hours - but no user interaction was required at all!
While the previous screenshot was made using the VirtueMart database of one of our customers, so far we can only show you results of the VirtueMart demo-data. It only includes few categories and few products but already gives a nice impression. The migration involved no change in Magento at all to produce the screenshot below.
Unfortunately, Vm2Mage is not yet stable enough to release anything to the public. Also things like pricing and the actual release schedule is unclear yet. But we hope to get back with more news soon.