Our client needed us to migrate all their content from two separate Content Management Systems to another single Content Management System, since managing two separate Content Management Systems was double work and expensive given the fact that they all provided the same content and of the same company. Therefore our goal was not only to migrate data from two different systems and merge them into a new one but also make the system stable.

The biggest challenge that the customer had was that the system was unstable, and very hard to manage. Most of the posts lacked both featured and inline images due to broken image links. The client was envisioning linking media to their related posts manually, which would have taken months given that we are talking about thousands [100,000 -150,000] of articles. Any plugin designed to perform migration from one CMS to another was not of help in this case, since the client’s system was complex and much customized. We had to come up with a unique and customized way of automating the process, and there were a quite number of issues along the way;

1. Unstable repository of images: Images were kept separately from posts. Every time a developer changed anything that is linked to the images repository that the client was using, it would result into the site crashing that images were not displayed on the site anymore.
2. Linking both featured and inline images to their related posts
3. Complex database structure: apart from not having items of a post in one place/database, the contents of posts themselves were encrypted and they had to be decrypted to perform the migration
4. Most of the tags and images we not showing on the site after migrations.
5. Inconsistent way of forming URLs: there was no consistent way of forming URLs in the customer’s system, and they had to be kept as they were originally as not to disturb any system which had used links to any of the post/content that was on the client’s site.

1. Studied database structure to ensure proper migration of the content.
2.  Programmed a script to solve the image loading problem
3. We also used the same script for the image to solve “the link image to articles” issues too.

1. A robust system with a capability of disaster recovery.