Re: CMS migration

Anttonen, Jaakko, VF-Group wrote:
> We are undertaking a project to migrate our content management
> platform from Vignette V6 to a new solution which is yet to be
> decided. As part of the general project plan we have started
> investigating our options to migrate our content.
> 
> Our biggest challenge is (beside that we haven't decided on the
> target CMS yet) having to export content stored as HTML, tidy it up
> and convert it to XML.
> 
> Do CMS vendors provide tools in this area? What we need is a tool
> that could spider the live website, store the content as a repositary
> that can be edited against and finally be loaded to the target CMS.

I have done a number of conversion projects from other CMS products to 
our own. The solution I have ended up with is to, if possible, connect 
to the other CMS's database and read the raw data, and convert it to an 
intermediate format (RDF in my case). This usually takes quite some 
time, and requires effort with regard to mapping concepts in the other 
CMS to ours. I have a tool that allows me to visually browse the 
generated RDF.

When I am satisfied with the result I just use a web service in our own 
tool which takes the XML data in RDF format and creates and populates 
the website from that.

This approach is useful since it allows me to have a rapid testing 
process where I view the output RDF instead of doing the full pipeline 
into our own CMS all the time.

In my experience it is very rare that the generated HTML from another 
website is enough, as there is usually much much more information 
available in the database that does not show on the website.

So, I think it depends more on the CMS you are converting to. Does it 
have support for import of XML? Can you easily create such XML from the 
source CMS? etc.

regards,
   Rickard