Creating template overrides to support MageBridge - Yireo

Migrating customers using Vm2Mage

Customer records are easily migrated by Vm2Mage from VirtueMart to Magento - including all their details (orders and addresses). However, there are a couple of things you need to know before starting off. This whitepaper deals with all customer-related topics with Vm2Mage.

From usernames to email-addresses

The concept of an username is actually absent in Magento. Instead, a customer logs in using its email-address and a password. When migrating from VirtueMart to Magento this could mean that your customers need to deal with new login credentials. It's best to send out a mailing to your customer with a small procedure of how the login has changed. Beware that passwords could pose a problem as well, as layed down below.

No migraton of salted passwords

Older versions of Joomla! store the passwords of customers as a MD5-checksum in the database. MD5 is used here as a simple widespread encryption, but though it's quite popular, it's not safe. There for newer Joomla! versions have introduced the concept of salted passwords, wherein the regular MD5-checksum is complemented by a little random string called the "salt". Unfortunately, the salting mechanism used by Joomla! is incompatible with the salting mechanism of Magento. Hower, plain MD5-checksums are compatible with Magento.

In short: If you are using plain old MD5-checksums, Vm2Mage automatically migrates passwords from VirtueMart to Magento, and your customers do not need a password reset. However, if you are using the newer salted passwords in Joomla!, your customers will need a password reset.

Migrating addresses

Vm2Mage will migrate addresses as part of the customer migration. Addresses marked as billing addresses in VirtueMart will be migrated as billing addresses to Magento. The same applies to shipping addresses.

Migrating product reviews

Migrating product reviews is part of the customer migration as well. Some information like rating is dropped, because the VirtueMart rating system is incompatible with the Magento equivalent. Because the Magento review-system requires a title and a nickname, a meaningless dash ("-") is used as title while the first name of the customer is picked as nickname.

Product reviews will be migrated again and again with each customer migration. If you migrate a customer twice, the customer record will be updated the second time, but the product reviews will be added twice.

Connecting Joomla! and Magento

Using the Yireo extension MageBridge you can integrate Magento into Joomla!. This saves you the time of developing a fresh new Magento theme. Also, if you migrate from VirtueMart to Magento stand-alone, all encrypted passwords are lost. With MageBridge, you can migrate without a password-reset.