Have you ever needed to switch from one content management system to another? Maybe you were moving from something closed-source to something open source. Maybe moving from something older to something fancy and new? Maybe from something traditional like WordPress to one of those cool new "Headless CMSs."
Whatever the reason, there's always things that go great and things that go... unexpectedly.
What are you best and worst stories from migrating a site from one CMS to another? What bugs did you find? Did you redesign at the same time? Were your editors scared or excited?
Top comments (5)
I have switched from WP to Jekyll and back.
From WP to Jekyll was rather simple, export using a plugin, Jekyll Export, and most of the needed files are there.
The other way around, not so much. Using the XML RSS feed and WP All Import (free) only allows for the 10 latest posts. Images, on the other hand, had to review post by post and link the images once again. And for the post 11 onwards, had to reopen each post and copy-paste as a a new post with a past date...
I did WP to Jekyll back in the day. When I did it, Jekyll Export failed for me. It still wasn't too bad to go copy/paste the content of most of the blog posts, since Markdown respects line breaks as paragraphs (and I only had a dozen blog posts at the time).
Even further "back in the day" I did Moveable Type to WordPress and that went super smooth with the original WP importer.
MovableType to WP was a pain in the a**. Especially if you have a bunch of MT blogs :-)
What was the worst part? The post importing? The images? Amount of content? Theme conversion?
It's been so long that I may just be viewing my original MT->WP move with rose-colored glasses. I definitely didn't try to translate the theme over. I just went with a new theme in WP
uh...that was over 10years ago. But if remember it correctly I had 2 main problems:
MT had a different permalink (URL structure) that made a mess when moving to WP + I had to make tons of redirects and it all tumbled down a couple of blogs in Google
The second thing was weird broken line breaks which appeared from out of nowhere.
Oh and themes basically did not work on WP so had to use WP.