Plone Migration

Quintagroup provides Plone Migration Services that allow to migrate content from any static websites, websites based on other CMSs, or old Plone versions to any of Plone latest releases.

Over the past years, Plone has seen number of major releases - Plone 2.1, Plone 2.5, and Plone 3.x. Quintagroup currently supports customer's sites using all of these versions. In some cases we help our customers to build their sites from just a scratch, but in most cases we deal with Plone migration of customers' old websites (which might be static websites or sites based on any other content management system).

Redeveloping a site

Redevelopment of a website or intranet is usually connected with two main factors, that are bundled together in most cases. These are moving to a new platform, such as a new content management system and site redesign (aimed to get rid of the weaknesses in the current site or adding new functionality).

In any case, there is a need to migrate the content from the old site to the new site. This is not a simple process. A change in technology platforms makes the content migration challenging, as does a major restructure or redesign of the site.

Websites and intranets can consist of thousands, or tens thousands or even hundreds thousands of pages. Migrating this number of web pages to a new format is a huge task. Quintagroup suggests cost-effective Plone migration services, with which your website content can be moved to a new presentation quickly and with high accuracy.

Quintagroup Plone migration services enable you to safely migrate all structured and unstructured content, plus applications and infrastructures that support it. Our services provide Plone migration process that include metadata, keywords, permissions, states etc. migration from the existing production to the Plone environment.

Plone Migration Process

The challenge of any migration (as well as Plone migration) is to select the most suitable migration method that will allow to keep site weight for search engines and keep connections between site content valid.

Quintagroup has a number of tools at our disposal that allows us to make Plone migration process successful in every respect.

Content Survey

The general idea about completing Plone migration is to track old site content pages (their URLs) that are supposed to be migrated into Plone. Then prepare a list of URLs on a new site that content will be transferred to.

The simplest and the most reliable method to carry out Plone migration is to export content from the initial database in .csv files, then process it to fit new website and, finally, import content to the new website. But this approach is not always working. In some cases we use custom tools for grabbing content from the old website. Then the content is arranged in such a way that a structure of a new Plone-based site is generated.

While adapting all content for the new Plone-based website, special attention is paid to correct work of links - both internal and external. During Plone migration we do our best to keep connections between site content. If broken internal links are found - they are fixed and can be replaced with resolveUIDs, which enables us to manipulate with the content and to move it within the site without its interconnection loose.

SEO Consideration

Plone migration allows to take care of a new website SEO properties and make site friendly for search engines.

URLs

We can keep the same links (URLs) that were on the old static website if they were good from SEO point of view. In case old site links (URLs) were not good for search engines, we would recommend to create new: concise, descriptive, and readable.

This might sound frightening from SEO point of view. But for all those manipulations we can use permanent redirect from old bad URLs to new ones. As a result your site URLs become friendlier for search engines and you keep weight that your site has gained since its launching. You do not loose, you even get more site visitors that come from Google or any other search engine.

Site structure

While Plone migrating you can also think about site reconstruction, i.e. we can change site structure by creating site sections, subsections etc. for better content distribution.

Examples

Find examples of different projects migration into Plone in our Case Studies section. Here are two featured cases:

James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Rice University

Policy Tracker

How to get started

If during your site content migration to Plone, you also desire to find a new Plone hosting provider, please consider Quintagroup Plone/Zope hosting services and contact us for more information.