Migrating from Joomla 1.5 and Virtuemart 1.1.9

-- Joomla version -- : 3.36
-- PHP version -- : 2.3.5

Hello everyone,

I ve been trying to migrate my web site from joomla 1.5 and virtuemart 1.1.9 to latest version of joomla and hikashop.

What I had done:
1. Installed hikashop to joomla 1.5 and migrated the products and categories
2. Exported the hikashop tables from joomla 1.5 site base
3. Installed hikashop to new installed joomla 3.x site and imported hikashop tables from joomla 1.5 site base

Using SEF links in my old viruemart site and I want to redirect all product links from my old vieruemart product to new hikashop links. I was trying to enable vm redirect plugin but it is not working for me. I am looking for a way to do the redirection because my store is 5 years old and product links are really important for me. I have over 500 products so manual redirection is one of the solutions.

Do you have suggestions about my problem?

vm_redirect plugin is working only when also Virtuemart is installed.
You have to migrate also VM to latest 2.6 version.
But there are some limitations.
You have to use other alias for Hikashop as one you used for Virtuemart on old site.
For example if virtuemart had URL yoursite.com/shop , you have to set Hikashop to different alias e.g. yoursite.com/myshop .
Also if you used some SEF extension for Virtuemart on old site, chances are vm_redirect will not work.
This was my case as one of client's site were using some VM SEF extension and I ended up writing custom redirect plugin.

Hi,

You can read our documentation about how to migrate from Virtuemart:
www.hikashop.com/support/support/documen...port.html#virtuemart

To complete korzo's sentence:

Finally, at the end of the import, you will have the possibility to publish the VM redirect fallback plugin which will redirect the products and categories pages from VirtueMart to their HikaShop equivalent so that you don't loose your page rank on search engines.

So the only way is to migrate virtuemart 1.1.9 to latest version which is compatible already with joomla 3.x or to install redirect extension and do the redirect links manually.

I haven't time to test it yet, but I suppose redirect plugin will work also with Virtuemart 3 on Joomla 3.3 as long as you didn't use any Virtuemart SEF extension on old site.

Hi,

The "redirect fallback" plugin is there to catch URL which are pointing to "com_virtuemart", read the product id and redirect the user to the corresponding product in HikaShop.
This plugin has mostly been made to migrate from VM to HikaShop in the same website.

For "new" websites, where VirtueMart won't be installed at all, you should use a third party extension in order to transfer your old URL from your old website to new url in your new.
Because you're building a brand new website, the won't be able to keep all pages with the exact same URL ; so you have to list URL (or pattern url) to make your compatibility.

Regards,

So, I think 3rd party extension is the best solution for me with 500-600 products.

It will be hard to redirect all links because my old web are site.com/category/product-title and a lot of products have more than one category

Can you recommend me 3rd party extension for doing that?

Hi,

You can use any SEF extension with a URL alias system, like for example sh404SEF.

any other suggestions except sh404SEF?

Potentially JoomSEF, or others which can be found on the Joomla extension directory
Here