Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

Migrating users between Joomla! and Magento

When you add MageBridge to an existing configuration (an existing Joomla! site or an existing Magento site), you'll want to make sure that existing customers can still use their login. This tutorial discusses the details of migrating users from Joomla! to Magento, or vice versa.

Migrating from Joomla! to Magento

When you have an existing Joomla! database and add Magento to this setup, your Joomla! users will not have corresponding user records in Magento yet. There are two ways to approach this problem:

• Let MageBridge deal with this automatically
• Migrate all users at once to Magento

The cool thing here is that MageBridge is actually able to deal with this problem automatically: As soon as a Joomla! users logs in into Joomla!, MageBridge will try to login that user in Magento as well - this principle is called Single Sign In (SSI). If the user (or customer as Magento calls it) is not yet available in Magento, MageBridge will create the user record automatically for you.

Important to note is that MageBridge will also transfer the blank password to the new Magento customer-record. This way, as soon as the customer has logged in once, he/she will be able to login into Magento stand-alone as well.

Another option is to migrate all Joomla! users to Magento at once. This is discussed in the tutorial Importing and exporting users. But one important thing to note here is that in this scenario passwords are encrypted, so MageBridge will not be able to transfer them.

This means that MageBridge still operates without problems, but that the customer-record in Magento is created without a valid password. Customers will not be able to login into Magento stand-alone, until they login once through MageBridge.

Migrating from Magento to Joomla!

Almost the same applies when migrating from existing Magento customers to a new Joomla! site. When a customer logs into MageBridge, the Joomla! authentication will fail but the MageBridge authentication will allow the customer to login. And once the customer logs into Joomla!, a corresponding record (including the password) will be created.

But when using a batch-operation to migrate Magento customers into Joomla!, it works a bit different. When Magento creates a Magento user-record without a password, this is actually illegal, so this issue needs to be restored as soon as the user logs in. But in Joomla!, an user-record without a password is perfectly illegal.

This means that when the user logs in, he/she will not be able to change his/her password in the Joomla! account-settings, but only in the MageBridge account-settings. If you want to use the MageBridge account-pages anyway, this poses no problem. But if you want to use the Joomla! account-settings while also importing users by batch, this is something to keep in mind.