I found out Magmi while writing my Esprinet importer for Magento.

I think that using Magento API is the cleanest way to do every import operation but importing something like 70.000 products was absolutely TOO SLOW so I had to look for something else…

Magmi (which is released under the MIT license) does everything using SQL queries and it’s blazing fast! It also features a few really useful plugins, the one I like the most are:

• Category importer: you can type category names in CSV instead of category ids, really nice. It also creates parent categories if you use the “parent/child” syntax.
• Optimizer: runs some MySQL tables optimization before importing.
• Magento reindexer: updates all (or just some) Magento indexes, couldn’t live without it!

What I didn’t like?

• Using “/” for the category importer separator, I’ve a lot of categories with the “/” char in the name, so I hat to patch the plugin to use “->” instead of “/”. I think it could be better in any case but for the maximum flexibility it should be a part of the configuration options
• I couldn’t find any documentation about the CLI usage
• Using Magmi CLI it seems to me that the import progress file isn’t updated the right way

Anyway the Magmi team did a great job, hope it will continue to be maintained for future Magento releases.

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For everyone interested I just published my Esprinet importer for Magento.

It reads Esprinet’s dispoP.txt export file and convert it to CSV, passing it to a patched version of the great Magmi importer.

I also features a category choser/renamer/remapper to add some flexibility.

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A new maintainance release is ready just for you, giving you full natty compatibility, here’s the changelog:

———–
– 2.4.4 –
———–

* Frontend:
* Fixed usage message in uck-remaster to match the parameter handling
that was already implemented.
* Start message now contains output of uname and lsb_release. This
should help to better diagnose problems.
* customize script now outputs kernel and lsb_release info. This
should help to better diagnose problems,
* uck-gui now gives proper usage message and outputs uname and
lsb_release information.
* uck-gui now passes REMASTER_HOME to uck-remaster. Necessary for
changed behaviour of sudo in Natty. Fixes (#748209). Answer
questions #151311, #151108, #150223
* Backend:
* Extract proxy environment variables in uck-gui and pass them on to
the chroot environment around sudo calls. Solves (#111253)
* Modified customize_iso to correctly use REMASTER_HOME if SCRIPT_DIR
was not specified.
* Documentation:
* Fixed uck-gui man page: uck-gui does not accept a customization-dir
parameter.

Download UCK 2.4.4 or use our stable PPA.

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