Have you ever found out you owned a website you never knew about? Do you regularly get emails with “comments” about male enhancement and EXPERT SEO SERVICES!!!? If so, you may have a case of WordPress.

WordPress is a common infection and spreads easily, all it takes is one employee with a credit card and desk far enough away from IT and Marketing and next thing you know you have a full blown pandemic of “temporary” ill-branded microsites.

Thankfully, an outbreak of WordPress can be cured with a full panel of server antibiotics and Perficient’s Open Source WordPress to AEM migration tool.

Why not WordPress?

In all seriousness, while WordPress is a very easy tool to get started with a blog, in larger organizations it’s a struggle to keep multiple Wordpress instances secured, performant, aligned with brand / IT standards. Having additional websites, systems and hosting providers adds complexity to maintain an organization’s digital presence, so aligning on a single, enterprise platform eases the burden on IT and marketing teams.

Given that you’re reading a post by an Adobe architect, it should be no surprise that I’d recommend Adobe Experience Manager as an enterprise Digital Experience Platform. The Adobe Experience Cloud allows your organization to manage content across multiple sites, build an integrated, personalized digital experience using a single suite of tools.

Getting to AEM

AEM has a much more flexible and complex content model than WordPress. In WordPress each piece of content including pages, posts and assets are represented as a single document with content and metadata. Each widget on the page is represented as markup inside then content. In AEM, all content is represented as a complex element where the content and metadata are one in the same.

Additionally, WordPress’ default export mechanism exports the content as a single WRX (extended RSS) file. This supports transfers between instances of WordPress, but requires some work to transfer to another system.

To overcome these challenges, Perficient developed tooling to transform content from WordPress to AEM. This is a four part process:

1. Extract the content from WordPress in a WRX file

2. Transform the content into separate files and Metadata CSV files using the WordPress Extract Script

3. Create a content package with the AEM Migration Script

4. Load the content using the AEM Package Manager

At the end of the process, your content will be fully converted into AEM content, mapped into appropriate templates and components and ready to publish. The process even takes care of downloading images and packaging them up to be loaded into AEM Assets.

Seeing is Believing

Excited about the prospect of consolidating your disparate WordPress sites to AEM? Contact us and send us your WordPress WRX export and we’ll demo mapping your content into AEM.

Trying it out on your own and have questions? Leave a comment below!