CWI chooses Wagtail
CWI is the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in The Netherlands. Four Digits will create the new CWI website and migrate the content from Plone to Wagtail.
Four Digits is excited to create the CWI website
CWI is the birthplace of many algorithms and technologies. A few CWI notable achievements are:
- Piet Beertema registered the top-level domain.nl in 1986 when he was the systems administrator at CWI.
- CWI has the first internet domain in the Netherlands: cwi.nl
- Guido van Rossum developed the Python programming language in the early 1990s when he was a scientific associate at CWI.
The products and services that Four Digits deliver use Python and the internet. We are excited to use our expertise to help CWI, as we use many of CWI conceived algorithms and technologies in our day-to-day work.

From Plone to Wagtail CMS
The current website www.cwi.nl was created in Plone. Four Digits writes a data migration to move all content from Plone to Wagtail CMS. CWI published a lot about their activities. We will migrate thousands of news items, events, pages, documents, and images.
We connect to and read the Plone Rest API to get the data.
The current site is still in active use. Content is added, changed and removed.
Nightly data migration
Four Digits runs a data migration to an acceptance website. We do this every night. With this strategy we:
- Validate that the data migration code can handle all content changes in the current live website.
- Validate that the active development of the new website does not introduce errors in the data migration.
- Give CWI the possibility to review the data migration and approve it.
With the experience of all nightly migrations, we trust that the final data migration will go smooth as planned.
Proud
As high-tech heroes, we are proud to work for the birthplace of Python!