Goodbye MagentoConnectorBundle! Hello PIMGento!

Then our partners and friends from Agence Dn’D came to us with a radically different solution. Based on their Magento expertises, they developed PIMGento: a Magento module that allows Magento to digest native CSV files from Akeneo to import attributes, families, products and variant groups.
Not only this module was pretty complete, but it was blazingly fast! And if you read our previous blog post about our Magento Connector, the main issue we were trying to tackle was exactly the performance issue.

Pretty impressed by what we saw, we decided to take a small break, a deep breath and reconsider our position on our Magento connector.

When you look at it from a bird’s eye view, the PIM is really a hub on which data arrive, get better by being enriched/translated/cured and then are sent to the channels.

There is not doubt that connectors represent a big part of the solution. But at the same time, developing connectors for all existing ERPs, file formats, ecommerce systems, print systems, etc, is a giant task. A task that Akeneo alone, without a community, would never be able to achieve.

So our vision has always been to focus on the product itself and to provide a framework for creating connectors that allow to integrate new data source or channels easily. And with that, we were pretty confident that, from the community, will emerge connectors for the most popular applications.

In the case of Magento, it was a little bit different, as we wanted to offer our customers a Magento Connector almost from the start of Akeneo PIM’s life. Indeed we were expecting that the Magento ecosystem would be very close to our own nascent one.

But finally, the community did better than us and what Agence Dn’D produced is a better connector than what we have and even better than what we wanted to do. And that’s the reason why we decided to stop the development of our own Magento connector.

This decision was not an easy one to take, as some months of work were already invested in version 2. But at the end, it was the most logical decision and a decision better on par with our product and connectors vision.

The current version of our connector (1.2) will be supported until the next Akeneo release (1.4, expected for September this year) and discontinued after this release.

The Agence Dn’D module is available here: https://github.com/Agence-DnD/PIMGento and you can get all the installation instructions here: https://github.com/Agence-DnD/PIMGento/blob/master/README.md

You can also find a short demo video illustrating how fast and powerful PIMGento is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpC01qVIVFA

We will announce very soon a first webinar to present this new connector so stay tuned! In the meantime the Agence Dn’D team will be able to demo their great work on our booth at Imagine next week!