Project Type: Migration | UX Design | DevelopmentRole: Project LeadTechnology: PHP | JavaScript | MYSQLIn late 2014 I started working with A.M. Leonard, the parent company to Gardener’s Edge. I helped them will all things web related, to see more detail look at my A.M. Leonard specific project as well as Gardener’s Edge specific project. In late 2017 we started talking and planning their exit strategy off their current CMS. It was a proprietary CMS built on .NET, they felt they were at risk by staying on the platform for a few reasons. First it was very expensive for development work because there was no marketplace to leverage and the future of the company running the platform was bleak. If anything happened to the host of the platform it would put their business at risk.
There were a few contenders but, in the end, they decided to migrate to Magento Cloud. Since my company had no experience developing in Magneto, we were going to help them find another vendor for development and hosting. It took a lot of planning and approval on their end but in 2020 they were ready to pick a vendor and kick off the migration project. They came to us and asked us if we wanted to be the ones to help them across the finish line. Over the years our skills grew and we felt confident we could successfully migrate them to Magento so we agreed and took on our first Magneto project. We kicked off in July of 2020 and launched the new sites in February of 2021.
Like most migration projects the hardest part is migrating all the data, assets, and keeping parity of features from the old site to the new. Since these sites were on a proprietary system all the features of the site were custom built and had to be re-implemented in Magento. Luckily Magneto had most of these features baked in the platform and they have a pretty solid marketplace, this saved us a ton of time and them money.
One of the challenging features on the old platform that Magneto ended up playing nice with was their Pro Plus program, it’s a rewards program for their users that gives different price tiers based on how much they spend on a yearly basis. This feature was a big lift on the old platform but implementing it in Magento was surprisingly painless by using their stock customer groups. Overall, the learning curve to Magneto took a lot of time to implement all the old functionality but we were able to work through it.
At the time of writing this, the two sites have been live for almost a month. The deployment went off without a hitch but that’s not to say the days leading up to the deployment were not a total scramble because they were. The night before launch I realized that the team at Adobe had not generated production SSL cert’s and that was something they had to do. Luckily, they were able to get that done early morning of launch day and everything went off without a hitch. Performance is great and everyone on the A.M. Leonard side is happy and excited with all the new functionality they now have access to.
