WCMS 3 migration preparation checklist

Preparing your site for migration reduces migration issue remediation and decreases the time your site is required to be in a content freeze. 

Please review the following content and action the following tasks prior to submitting your site migration request. Many of these tasks are essential to proper site management and should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure your site's content and user information is current.

User management

• Encourage all content maintainers to complete the WCMS 3 courses available on LEARN
• The Website lead must choose Site owners for the site. The Site owner role is specific to WCMS 3. This role is the only role that can add users, manage user roles and permissions, access reports, and access certain site configuration tasks. We recommend there be no more than three Site owners: the Website lead, an alternate, and a long term active site manager that managed user access on the original site. Site owner selection will be stated on the Request a new WCMS 3 site form when the website lead submits the request. Please make sure the users chosen to be site owners already exist as site managers on the original site prior to migration. We will not add users to migrated sites and will only apply the site owner role to existing user accounts.
• Review all users and remove/edit permissions as necessary with special attention to the site manager role. Review the changes to user permissions in WCMS 3 to help make permission decisions. Note: The image banner content type is available for all content maintainer roles on WCMS 3 and is no longer restricted to site managers. Review users with the site manager role and if they are only required to create and edit content and don't require approval to publish, change their role to a content editor. If they require approval to publish, apply the content author role.

Content management

• Web forms:
  • Delete/unpublish unused Web forms.
  • Export/download Web form results. The WCMS is not meant to be used as a records keeping tool. This is a best practice to include in your site maintenance/management tasks.
  • Simplify your Web forms. Nested conditionals and variables may not migrate precisely because web forms in WCMS 3 behave differently and have different elements. You will be required to review and possibly restructure the conditionals of complex web forms after migration. Simplifying your webforms also creates a better user experience.
• Events, News items, and Blog posts:
  • Archive and delete any that are no longer needed/no longer viewed.
  • Delete unused tags.
• Tags:
  • Delete unused or tags that are no longer relevant from content.
• Image gallery: Stand-alone image galleries do not currently migrate and must be manually recreated, however, embedded image galleries will migrate.
  • Delete image galleries that are no longer needed.
  • Move stand-alone image galleries into nodes with an embedded image gallery.
  • Edit image galleries that contain many images without context (e.g. over 50 images from past conferences that do not have titles or captions).
• Redirects: Review Redirects to ensure proper paths, no circular redirects, no unnecessary redirects, etc.
• Expandable/collapsible content:
  • Review your use of expandable/collapsible content for usability and edit content accordingly.
  • The character limit for the headings of expand/collapse on WCMS 3 is currenlty 128 characters. Edit your expand/collapse headings if they exceed this character limit.
• Internal links:
  • Generate a Path review report that shows nodes where the body field contains fully-qualified ("external") URLs that likely should be local (internal), and amend these links.
• Images and files:
  • Review any that are not being used and permanently delete an image or document from the website.
• Summaries and description fields:
  • These fields are required in WCMS 3. If there is no content in the summary or description field on the WCMS 2 site, the migration script will migrate the first 160 HTML characters to those fields and will not acknowledge when to end a sentence. If those characters include an image, that will also require remediation. Ensuring that you have content in your summary and description fields in WCMS 2 will ensure the content is correct and decrease the number of remediations for your site.
• Remove any nodes in “embedded” content types types - Embedded call to action, Embedded facts and figures, Embedded timeline, and Image gallery - that you are not referencing anymore.
• Generate a Broken links report and view and fix broken links.
• Home page banners:
  • Unpublish any home page banners that are not currently in use.
  • Delete any home page banners that will not be used again.
  • Confirm the home page banner order and select "Rearrange home page banners (for slideshow)" to save your selections if you have rearranged the order.
  • Confirm that all current published home page banners have an associated display order number.
• Remove content in the following moderation states needs review, draft, and archived, as this content will not be migrated.
• Promotional items: This content type is not supported in WCMS 3 and must be recreated as a sidebar. Note: By recreating your Promotional item content as a sidebar, you will be required to edit the content of every sidebar individually since this is not a reusable block. Reusuable blocks are not currently available in WCMS 3.
  • Unpublish if no longer in use.
  • We highly recommend reviewing the content of the Promotional item and if you wish for it to be included, recreate the content as a sidebar or column prior to migration.
  • Thoroughly review the necessity of the Promotional item. If you still require that this content be created on a Sidebar, review the information in the Visibility field prior to migration. Remove any non-existent paths and if the Visibility field is blank and you intended for the Promotional item content to be available on all web pages, define which pages whould have the content as a sidebar (e.g. news/*, or if you would just like that content as a sidebar on the homepage, use the tag <front> in the Visibility field of the WCMS 2 site prior to migration)
• Bibliographies: Although this content type is available in WCMS 3, it does not migrate. If your site has bibliographies, we recommend waiting until this content type is included in the migration script. You can review the Building the Next WCMS Release Comparison page for updates.
• If your site is complex in content or size the website lead can contact our WCMS 3 migration coordinator, Charlotte Armstrong, for migration planning assistance.

When you have completed the site migration preparation tasks, let your website lead know and they can move forward with the next step of requesting a site migration.

Need some help?

Email our WCMS support email, wcms@uwaterloo.ca, for questions regarding:

• WCMS 2 and WCMS 3 content creation/editing help
• Who is the website lead for your site
• LEARN registration and training assistance
• General website questions

This page was last updated on October 25, 2023