Attribute-migrations

With Vm2Mage, products can be migrated from VirtueMart to Magento. And products have common attributes like names, descriptions, prices, weights. Vm2Mage therefor contains a mapping of VirtueMart product-attributes to Magento product-attributes so that all data is migrated correctly. Attributes are not straightforward in VirtueMart 1 though - there are attributes, and there are manufacturers ... which are also attributes.

Vm2Mage first gathers all possible attributes, bundles them in a data-stream and sends this to Magento to initialize them as Magento attributes. Before, this process was only done once (to speed up migrations), but if somebody messed up the Magento attributes afterwards, the whole database needed a reset. The new Vm2Mage now contains an option to simply wipe out the previous attributes, and recreate them automatically. This makes it definitely easier to undo mistakes.

Image-migrations

With images, Vm2Mage has 2 approaches: It can either download the images through the VirtueMart URL (handy if VirtueMart and Magento are not located on the same server). Or it can copy the images directly through the local filesystem. Because a simple check whether the images are actually stored locally, resulted in some situations in open_basedir warnings (thus flooding the Apache logs with pointless warnings), we have now made this local copying optional. If the two applications are not on the same server, you can disable Vm2Mage attempting to do a file-copy.

Another improvement is that there is a configurable option to reinitialize product-images. With this option enabled, Vm2Mage will delete all existing product-images and redownload (or locally copy) all images. Simple but very efficient.

Review-migrations

The migrations of reviews was also optimized. Reviews are actually linked to both product-entities as customer-entities, so for a succesfully migration, first all products need to be migrated and then all customers. However, in previous versions of Vm2Mage, replaying the review-migration would re-add reviews resulting in double migrations. This is now fixed.