Migration Overview

WollyCMS was built to replace traditional CMS platforms like Drupal and WordPress with a modern, headless architecture. If you’re running one of these platforms today, you can migrate your content to WollyCMS without losing pages, media, menus, or SEO metadata.

What migration involves

Every CMS migration follows the same basic pattern:

1. Inventory your existing site — content types, fields, media, menus, taxonomies
2. Map your content model to WollyCMS — content types become WollyCMS content types, paragraphs/blocks become WollyCMS blocks, etc.
3. Set up a WollyCMS instance — locally or on Cloudflare Workers
4. Write migration scripts that read from your old CMS and write to the WollyCMS Admin API
5. Migrate content in phases — pages first, then media, then menus
6. Verify everything transferred correctly
7. Build your Astro frontend and go live

Migration approach

WollyCMS migrations use Node.js scripts that call the Admin API. This gives you full control over the migration process — you can run it incrementally, fix issues between runs, and verify results at each step.

The general script pattern:

// 1. Read from source (MySQL dump, REST API, export file)
const posts = await getSourceContent();

// 2. Transform to WollyCMS format
for (const post of posts) {
  const page = {
    title: post.title,
    slug: post.slug,
    contentTypeId: TARGET_CONTENT_TYPE_ID,
    fields: mapFields(post),
  };

  // 3. Create via Admin API
  await fetch(`${CMS_URL}/api/admin/pages`, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'X-API-Key': API_KEY,
    },
    body: JSON.stringify(page),
  });
}

Platform-specific guides

• Migrate from Drupal — Content types, Paragraphs, Views, taxonomy, media fields
• Migrate from WordPress — Posts, pages, custom post types, Gutenberg blocks, ACF fields

Real-world example

Read the Community College Case Study to see how a mid-size institutional site migrated 1,300+ pages, 500+ media files, and 244 menu items from Drupal 10 to WollyCMS — cutting hosting costs from ~$20k/year to $5/month.

Key concepts

Rich text: HTML to TipTap JSON

WollyCMS stores rich text as TipTap JSON, not raw HTML. Your migration scripts need to convert HTML content to TipTap’s document format. A typical converter handles:

• Headings, paragraphs, lists, links, bold/italic
• Inline images (with URL rewriting to point to WollyCMS media)
• Tables, blockquotes, horizontal rules

Several open-source libraries handle this conversion. The Drupal and WordPress guides include examples.

Media migration

Media migration happens in two passes:

1. Structured media — Images referenced by content type fields (hero images, thumbnails, profile photos). Download from the old site, upload to WollyCMS, update the page field with the new media ID.
2. Inline media — Images and documents embedded in rich text content. After uploading, rewrite URLs inside the TipTap JSON to point to the new WollyCMS media paths.

URL redirects

Map old CMS paths to new WollyCMS slugs. WollyCMS pages use clean slugs (/about/financial-aid), and your Astro frontend can handle redirects from old paths (e.g., Drupal’s /node/123 or WordPress’s /?p=456).

Pagination

The WollyCMS content API returns a maximum of 50 items per request. Migration scripts that verify content should paginate through all results.