Custom Magento script to expedite the catalog migration process.

Another custom Briteskies solution has gone live!

The Briteskies Magento Development Team recently began working with a small B2C retailer to update their site. The company has one brick and mortar location and has been in business for 75 years. Their previous site, which resided on AS/400, did not allow the client to have any control over their product catalog. They turned to the Briteskies team to replatform their site to Magento Community 1.9 in order to allow the company full access to their product catalog and take advantage of the Magento eCommerce functionalities.

For the Magento team, this project was a straight migration of information, including the product catalog. The capabilities accessible through the Magento platform would then give the client the power to make any additions or changes to the catalog on their own. Although the catalog migration process is fairly straightforward, it is also time consuming. Dan Shaffer, a member of the Magento Development team, wrote a script for the client that executes a mass/bulk creation of categories for Magento to expedite the catalog migration process.

Product imports are an aspect of most Magento replatforms. In this instance, the client sent over a CSV file for a product import of over 13,000 items that were detailed into over 500 categories. Prior to being able to import the product items, the new categories had to be set up. Dan isolated the categories needed from the provided CSV into a new CSV following the standard Magento category formatting and then wrote the script to do a mass category input.

The script sorts, removes duplicates and trims whitespace of the categories to ensure continuity. It creates the categories one at a time and saves the assigned entity ID to an associative array that is used when building future parent-child relationships. The standardized nature of the script cuts down on the number of data inconsistencies that can occur as a result of human error. Using the traditional method of uploading the CSV file into Magento manually using the admin tool, the catalog migration would have taken over a week.

Dan’s script speeds up this process and allows developers to spend their time developing, instead of working in the Magento admin panel, which in turn can translate into cost savings for the client. While Dan’s solution was incredibly helpful for the project at hand, it will be of even more value going forward as it saves development hours for future customers looking to transition their product information to Magento.