How to replace an existing CMS piecemeal?

[johnstephens]

I have a site operating on Textpattern CMS. I still love Texptattern, which has served us well for many years—but the needs of this site have steadily grown beyond the limits of what Textpattern can do comfortably. I'd like to transition the site to ProcessWire, but the project doesn't have a budget for a full redesign right now.

I'm wondering if it's feasible to install ProcessWire now, and create a limited number of pages managed by ProcessWire; then seamlessly redirect all requests for pages not managed by ProcessWire to Textpattern.

Then, over time, I'd like to migrate the remaining templates and content to ProcessWire so that more and more of the site is being managed by ProcessWire, until the Textpattern site is no longer needed.

Has anyone else done something like this? What steps did you take to minimize any possible disruption? How would you recommend setting something like this up?

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer!

[dragan]

1 hour ago, johnstephens said:

Has anyone else done something like this?

Not me. It sounds like a recipe for headache, frankly speaking.

1 hour ago, johnstephens said:

How would you recommend setting something like this up?

It really depends on lots of things... You should tell us more about your current site. What does it do? How complex is it? How many templates do you have now? How dynamic is it - or needs to be in the future? (for visitors and editors) How much functionality is there currently in terms of users interacting with the site (register, login, user profiles, voting / commenting....) ? Is it really just a "brochure" site (mostly static content for frontend-users, but manageable by editors) ? Or really more like a web-application?

1 hour ago, johnstephens said:

doesn't have a budget for a full redesign right now

A redesign is not the same as porting content from CMS A to CMS B. If the site architecture will most likely remain, then I'd talk to the client and persuade them to allow budget to transfer the entire site in one go from Textpattern to PW (using the same frontend markup). In the long run, this would probably be more efficient. Once everything is running in PW, you could then later discuss about a redesign.

[wbmnfktr]

Oh my... I loved Textpattern so much back in the days. I used to use it for everything and it was a joy. Then... as projects became larger and more complex I found ProcessWire. I migrated all my sites over and it was pretty easy - at least in my case.

First of all I migrated all the templates for sections and articles over. Rebuild the logic like posts per pages, custom article views, listings and those things. It took a while because ProcessWire was still new to me then. But after that it was pretty easy.

I created custom templates to create CSV exports of all my content (maybe a total of 300 pages and 10 sections). Afterwards I imported everything from my CSV files, put everything in place, created lots of redirects and done.

The one thing that was quite work intensive... image migration. I did it for each and every site manually. Wouldn't be a problem today but at that time I wasn't that good in handling files. ? 

ProcessWire modules I used:

https://modules.processwire.com/modules/process-jumplinks/

https://modules.processwire.com/modules/import-pages-csv/