Acquia Commerce Manager synchronizes its data from your commerce solution for products and categories. This means that all of your product and inventory data remains safely stored in your commerce solution, with the Commerce Connector Service ensuring communications with your Drupal website.
After you have created your products and categories in your commerce solution, synchronization ensures that Drupal is up-to-date with your commerce data.
Note
Your commerce solution is the source of truth for all data. Data will always synchronize from your commerce product, to Acquia Commerce Manager. Data must be maintained in your commerce solution your commerce solution administrators.
Creating categories
Product categories are created in your commerce solution, and when synchronized with your Drupal website, become taxonomy terms, which can then be used in all the normal ways taxonomy can be manipulated for display. For example, here is what your categories might look like in Magento:
When synchronized with Drupal, the Drupal taxonomy page should appear similar to the following:
For a full explanation of creating categories in Magento, see Creating Categories.
To get started quickly, or to test your integration, you can create categories using the following steps:
Sign into your Magento server as an administrator.
Click Products, and then click Categories.
Select Add Subcategory.
Enter a name for the category in the Category Name field (which is a required field).
Click Save to save your new category. Magento will display your new category in the category list.
Sign in to your Drupal website as an administrator.
Click Commerce > Configuration > Synchronize Categories. If successful, you should receive a
Category Synchronization Completemessage.Verify the synchronization by going to Structure > Taxonomy.
Next to Product Category, click List terms.
Important
Synchronize your categories before synchronizing products. Failure to synchronize categories first will result in failure to place products into the correct categories.
Your categories should now be listed on the page.
Creating products in Drupal, using Magento
Similar to categories, products are also originally created in your commerce solution. and then synchronized to your Drupal website. To learn more about creating products in Magento, see Creating Products.
To create a basic product and add it to your Drupal website, complete the following steps:
Sign into your Magento server as an administrator.
Click Products, and then click Catalog.
Click Add Product.
Fill out the fields for your product.
Click Save.
Sign in to your Drupal website as an administrator.
Go to Commerce > Configuration > Synchronize > Synchronize Products (
async). By default, your content will synchronize in batches of 50.Click Content.
As products synchronize from your commerce solution, they will appear in the Content. You may want to refresh occasionally to review the list of items. The data transfer may take several minutes to complete, depending on the number of changes made to your commerce system. While product details may be cached, product inventory information should remain at or near real-time.
Magento will disable products in the Drupal website that are no longer available. To do this, Magento uses the Commerce Connector Service to send notifications to the website.