Re: CMS migration

Anttonen, Jaakko, VF-Group wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 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.
> 

Hi,

First I would echo what some others have said:

- take the content directly from StoryServer
- it is process that should be done in several passes
- it is not quick

Do you have a schema you want to convert to (possibly just XHTML?)? Did 
people use a common structure and classes uniformly on the HTML? :)

This is going to require manual intervention. I don't think any product 
can do all the work for you to any satisfactory level.

I would start by exporting the database's content chunks into static 
files. The I would use a tool like Ant (http://ant.apache.org) to create 
several passes over the files. THe first would be to XMLTidy it up into 
well formed HTML. THen, I would use XSL to to convert the wellformed 
HTML into something that is uniform and validate it against some 
intermediate schema. Repeatedly modify the XSL until you get all files 
to validate. Then use XSL again to go to your final content which would 
also be validated against some schema - repeat until valid.

Even if several people used different styles/structures, pattern will 
begin to emerge. Just whittle away until you get there. We have done 
this for existing websites and Word docs -- not fun, but not necessarily 
difficult.

No magic bullet

best,
-Rob





> Best Regards,
> Jaakko
> Vodafone Group Services Ltd
> www.vodafone.com
>