Switching from OS Commerce to Zen Cart

[pjb923]

I have someone who wants to update an existing OS Commerce site to Zen Cart, and I was wondering what would be involved in this process.

I have already read about how to import the database, but I'm concerned with templates now.
I am not very familiar with OSC and wanted to know if there was an easy way to integrate an OSC template into Zen.

Has anyone made this transition?

[Stuff4Toys]

Ouch
I am NOT a programmer by any means, but from my view of the code in the templates all the references to osc would have to be changed to zen.

Not sure what else you would run into.
JOhn ><>

[lib99]

Many have made the transition, including myself. It's very worth your while to do the same.

With data migration, the one thing that couldn't be saved were passwords. Some communication with your customers and a link to mimic the forgotten password functionality (from login page), worked for us.

As for the template. No easy migration possible. Template system for Zen Cart is vastly different than OSC's. Your best bet it to bite the bullet and recreate the template in for ZC. You could also take it as an opportunity to create a new one??

The ZC forums, wiki, and FAQ/Tutorials provide a lot of information for the migration process. Good luck!!

[starcad]

I'm doing this with my site. I was able to partially migrate the database products and categories. However, let me say that data base manipulation is not for the faint of heart and always backup the database before you do anything to your site. Again let me stress to back up the database. I was able to print out a category list of the Zen tables and the OSC tables and compare them and correct the Zen. From there it has just been a matter of updating the path to the images and the products. I have 257 products and in the last two days have only 50 updated but at 50 a night I should be ready in around four more days. The ease of working with Zen over OSC is like going from a VW to a Catilac as the Admin functions are very easy to use. The support forums here are fantastic, better organized and monitored for there quality.

[mikedeezy33]

I am in the process converting to zen cart right now, except I am coming from CRELoaded. There is a database conversion mysql script somewhere else on these forums.Please review this post by ah_sim:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20788

[pjb923]

Thanks for all the tips.

I'm going to start working on this tonight. I am very comfortable with modifying a template to create the same look as the OS Commerce store, I was just hoping to be able to cut some corners and recycle some files from the original install. I guess that idea is not going to work out.

The tips on the database migration should be a big help. I was thinking of exporting the product tables from the OSC shop, then manipulating the data into a format that would be compatible with Easy Populate. I have had lots of success with EP in the past and I think I can use it to my advantage here.

I'll report back and let everyone know how it goes.

[manada]

Converted from Osc to Zen in Nov last year. So far it was the best decision I made.

[pjb923]

Things are going very well so far.

I had a lot of luck using easy populate. The store that I was migrating from was actually OSCMAX, which has easy populate built in. I was able to export the catalog to excel, change the header row titles to match the ZenCart template and import with no problems.

To get the look of the site to match, I was able to copy the html from the header and footer into the Zen header and footer. Then I copied the parts of the stylesheet that were needed to style links, image borders, background colors, etc...

Tomorrow's task will be trying to copy over the customer information.

[IronMac]

I'm seriously considering migrating a friend's OS Commerce store over to ZC. I've printed out the relevant tutorial pages (from what I gather are the relevant ones) and am wondering if they will be sufficient?