How feasible is it to migrate from one CMS to another? [closed]

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I have a specific need to migrate static content from a Sitecore CMS to a Sitefinity CMS. But I also have a repeated general need to migrate content from environment X to environment Y. Grabbing the main content of each page (not the navigational skeleton, etc.) is sufficient. Is doing this automatically (by this I mean that manual intervention does not scale with the number of migrated pages) wishful thinking or is it feasible?

I think the assumption that has to be made (for this to be a meaningful question) is that the amount of content is unmanageably large - no team of people will be able to help migrate the pages or even validate that they were all migrated correctly. I don't know how often this assumption is actually true in practice - I've worked on large sites for large organizations and people seems to always find a way to manual work on the whole body of content.

I think the first part of the question is "Has anyone ever seen this done successfully?". Usually what I see is people taking this opportunity to cull and reorganize content and do a bunch of manual stuff because they (correctly) feel like it's an opportune moment to do it. I've never seen a hands-off migration myself.

And the second part of the question is it is something that can be done effectively, how do you do it effectively? In the specific case above, one could either write a site-crawler to pull content from the current site and then use the Sitefinity API to add pages programmatically. Or, instead of a site-crawler, the Sitecore API could be used to access the content. Even for a CMS that provides an API, as Sitecore does, it's not clear to me which is more effective. And some existing sites do not have an API so that's not even a choice.

Any insight or references to tools that support this type of effort is helpful. Thank you.

Answer 1

There's too many specifics here: we have no access to your Sitecore implementation, your HTML or your business requirements.

Yes, sites have successfully been migrated in and out of Sitcore/various CMSs, some will use the API to retrieve data, others may use crawler and HTMLAgilityPack to parse HTML, depends on your current content structure. How do you deal with shared content for example? What about migrating internal links, or links to media? Are you doing a like-for-like migration or is the site also getting a redesign? How competent are Content Editors? Maybe you can do a first pass migration with automation but more than likely somewhere down the line some manual intervention will be needed or you will need some more automation to fix something which you initially overlooked.

So it's going to depend on exactly how much content you have, and how much time/effort it is to automate vs manual re-entry.

As LittleBobbyTables says, it will just be opinion as none of us have the facts you have at your disposal.

To answer your question directly, yes I have worked on automated migration, but for very specific areas of the site and everything I say above had to be taken into account, we went back over the content several times because sample content looked fine but some content had weird formatting etc. Difficult to do in a very generic way.