Moving a training-resources catalogue to a new store in about a week

The challenge

An Australian web and design agency was rebuilding the online store of a business that sells training resources to registered training organisations. The existing shop ran on WooCommerce, and the new site was being built on Joomla 4 with a commerce extension and a page-builder theme.

The catalogue could not simply be exported and re-imported. Each product carried structured content, including Features and Elements Covered sections, that needed to land in matching custom fields on the new site. Much of the older content also used preformatted text and manual line breaks, which would display poorly in the new theme. The agency wanted the move done quickly, without rekeying products by hand.

What we did

• Custom export and import script. We wrote a script that exports products from WooCommerce and imports them as Joomla articles with title, price, quantity and description.
• Custom field mapping. Features and Elements Covered were mapped into dedicated Joomla custom fields, so the new templates can display them consistently.
• Content clean-up on import. Preformatted blocks and line breaks were converted into proper HTML lists during the import, giving clean, readable product pages.
• Category handling. Products were placed in their matching categories, with any unmatched items defaulting to the main Shop category so nothing was lost.
• Sample first, then full run. We imported a sample of products for the agency to review, then ran the full import once the mapping was approved.
• Re-import and admin support. After the theme was set up fresh, we re-ran the import, and we restored super-user permissions when the admin account became locked out.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, WordPress / WooCommerce, Joomla 4, J2Commerce, YOOtheme