What a Wagtail Migration Actually Takes

Getting content into Wagtail is its own project, and it usually takes longer than anyone plans for. It also decides whether the new CMS ends up any better than the old one.

A migration is a content project that happens to have code in it. The import script is the smallest and most predictable piece of work, and almost everything that goes wrong goes wrong somewhere else. Wagtail also makes some of these decisions for you, earlier than you might expect. The page tree carries your URLs and permissions, so information architecture stops being something you can defer. StreamField means every piece of legacy content has to become a specific block, which you can't decide until the block library exists. Rich text arrives lossy. Images and documents are objects that have to exist before the pages that reference them. Multiple languages duplicate the whole tree. None of it is a complaint, but all of it changes the order you work in.

I've run migrations into Wagtail at both ends of the scale, from a public library with forty pages to organizations publishing thousands of pages in dozens of languages. Most went well, some were messy.

How the talk runs

• The inventory, and why it's a set of decisions rather than a list of URLs.
• Estimating. More parts than people plan for, and only one of them is a page count.
• Transformation, which is where Wagtail shapes the work most: blocks, rich text, and media.
• Phasing and scheduling, including why the timeline belongs to the content team.
• Knowing when you're finished, which is later than the day the content lands.
• This talk stays on the content side. Environments, deployment and integrations all matter, and none of them are what sinks a migration.

What you'll leave with

• A way to size a migration that survives contact with the actual content
• The questions worth asking before agreeing to a date
• A sense of which decisions Wagtail wants you to make early, and what it costs to make them late
• A clearer definition of done than "the content is in"

About Michael Trythall

Michael has been designing and building content-managed websites for nearly 20 years. He enjoys creating delightfully compelling user experiences to solve big problems. He is the Director of Strategy at Lincoln Loop, where he helps clients turn ideas into fully functional web-based products.