Data migration from Plone to Django or Wagtail
Four Digits can help you convert your website from Plone to Django or Wagtail. Four Digits used to provide Plone services, but has switched to Django and Wagtail. We chose Django and Wagtail because they are easier to customise to the customer's needs.
Plone is a good and secure CMS. However, it has some down-sides:
- Plone is hard to customize. The smallest change can be a big challenge.
- Plone is resource-heavy and has high hosting costs.
- Fewer and fewer companies provide Plone support.
What about your content?
Creating content is a lot of work. When moving away from Plone to new technology, the existing content (images, documents, and texts) needs to transfer to the new website. It is called data migration or content migration.
Get data out of Plone
Plone stores data in ZODB and blob storage. These formats are hardly used outside Plone. The ZODB is not usable without the Python source code used to create the data. The way to access Plone data is by running Plone itself and performing queries through it.
To get data out of your Plone project, we install the project and some additional packages, and export the ZODB data to JSON files.
From Plone to Django
Plone is a CMS. It deals with pages. Editors can create and structure pages themselves. Django is a web framework. It enables developers to create web applications from scratch.
Why migrate Plone to Django? Well, some Plone projects are not about pages. They are not CMS-like. For example, an auction website is about users, lots, and bids. If the project is not CMS-like, you don't need a CMS. You might be better off with a Django application.
To get data out of Plone and into a Django project, our developers do the following steps:
- Inspect Plone content-types and rewrite them as Django models.
- Install and run the Plone project.
- Export ZODB data to JSON files.
- Write a Django command to import the JSON files into the Django project.
From Plone to Wagtail CMS
Both Plone and Wagtail are content management systems. Wagtail extends Django. The migration from Plone to Wagtail is similar to the migration from Plone to Django.
Wagtail provides similar features as Plone but is light-weight and easy to customize.
Four Digits can help migrate your Plone data
We have a hand full of Plone experts in-house. However, we won't actively develop Plone websites anymore. But we are happy to migrate your Plone project to Django or Wagtail.