Want to move a blog from your current CMS to a new CMS (or into Uberflip)? Here's what you need to do to keep your connected Uberflip Blog Streams running smoothly and avoid problems.
Before you begin
- To follow the steps in this guide, you need to be a member of the Account Administrators or Content Managers user groups.
- Make sure to read the migration procedure for your chosen option in full before you proceed.
Warning
Do NOT take your existing CMS/blog host offline until you have completed the migration procedure!
If your existing CMS/blog host becomes unavailable before the migration is finished, you will be unable to perform certain key steps, which may make it impossible to complete the migration successfully.
Objective
In Uberflip, you can bring content from a blog you host elsewhere (typically in a CMS like WordPress) into your Hub by importing the blog using a Blog Stream. When you do this, you keep maintaining the external blog, and Uberflip automatically pulls in new posts (and can even update older posts when you edit them).
In this article, you'll learn what you need to do when moving your external blog to another hosting service (i.e. to another CMS, or into Uberflip), in order to ensure that your connected Uberflip Blog Stream experiences minimal disruption. Specifically, the migration procedures described in this article are designed to help you:
- Avoid reimporting existing content into Uberflip (i.e. duplicate content)
- Avoid broken images in blog content
- Avoid broken inline links in blog content
- Ensure the Blog Stream continues to update automatically
Option 1: Move an external blog to a different external hosting service
Use this migration procedure if:
You are currently hosting your blog on a service outside Uberflip (such as a CMS, or any other type of blog hosting solution), and want to move the blog to another service outside Uberflip.
Info
This migration procedure assumes that:
- You are only changing the CMS (or other service) that hosts your blog, and that the blog itself will otherwise remain unchanged, i.e. it will still have the same name, be available at the same URL, etc.
- Your new CMS has already been set up and is ready for migration.
Step 1: Pause automatic updates on the Blog Stream
Do this:
Pause automatic updates on the Blog Stream that imports content from the blog that you are moving to a new CMS.
- In Uberflip, go to the Content section.
- Click on the Blog Stream that pulls in posts from your current CMS to open it.
- Click on the Options tab.
- Turn on the option Pause automatic updating of this Stream.
Why?
This will stop the Blog Stream from pulling in further content from the old CMS while you migrate to the new CMS, which helps to avoid creating duplicate content in Uberflip.
Step 2: Set up the RSS feed in the new CMS
Do this:
Set up the RSS feed in your new CMS on the same URL and with the same GUID format.
How you do this will vary depending on your CMS, so you should speak with your CMS administrator. What you need to accomplish is:
- Set up the RSS feed in your new CMS on the exact same URL as the RSS feed in your old CMS.
- Set up the GUID format for posts in the new CMS's RSS feed to exactly match the GUID format used by the old CMS's RSS feed.
Note
There are multiple ways to format GUIDs. While the most widely used option is to use the item's direct URL as its GUID, another common approach is to use ID codes.
If you use an ID code format for your GUIDs, try to configure your new CMS so that it assigns ID codes to RSS feed items in a way that is consistent with the old CMS: for example, if a given blog post had the ID code ABC123 in the old CMS, the new CMS should give that same ID code to the same blog post when it assigns GUIDs.
Why?
Your existing Blog Stream is configured to look at a particular RSS feed URL (like https://www.mycompany.com/blog/feed/) for new posts, so by setting up the RSS feed in the new CMS on the exact same URL, you ensure that the Blog Stream can keep pulling in new posts.
Likewise, GUIDs uniquely identify posts in an RSS feed. Your Blog Stream keeps track of the GUIDs for all of the posts it has imported, and uses these GUIDs to avoid importing the same post more than once. By keeping the formats of the GUIDs the same between the old and new CMS, you ensure that your Blog Stream won't view old posts on your new CMS as "new" content and import it (creating duplicates).
Step 3: Migrate images
Do this:
If you are using your old CMS to host the images used in your blog, migrate the images to your new CMS, then find and replace the image URLs to update them (if needed).
- If you are moving from one CMS to another CMS, there will likely be a built-in process to migrate images from one system to another. Speak with your CMS administrator for details.
- After performing this migration, you will also need to export a list of image URLs from your old CMS, and a corresponding list of image URLs in your new CMS, and provide these to your Uberflip representative.
Why?
If you host blog images on your old CMS, those images will no longer be available when you take the old CMS out of service, which results in broken images in your blog posts. To ensure images remain available, you must migrate them to be hosted on the new CMS.
This migration will allow images to be displayed correctly when the blog is hosted on the new CMS, but will not affect posts that Uberflip previously imported from the old CMS. These posts will still reference the old URLs where the images used to be hosted, and will therefore be broken. To ensure the images in these blog posts are still displayed correctly, the old image URLs must be found and replaced. If you provide a list of old image URLs, and their counterparts in your new CMS, your Uberflip representative can perform this find-and-replace action for you.
Step 4: Create a new Blog Stream to test the new RSS feed
Do this:
Add a new Blog Stream in Uberflip to test the RSS feed in your new CMS.
- In your Uberflip account, add a new Blog Stream and specify the RSS feed from the new CMS.
- Review the Blog Stream to check that everything looks normal, i.e. posts look as expected, images are coming in, etc.
- If there are no problems, archive the Blog Stream to remove the duplicate content it created from your Hub.
Why?
Creating a new Blog Stream for testing allows you to check that the RSS feed in the new CMS has been configured correctly without affecting the existing Blog Stream. The test Blog Stream will be a duplicate of the existing one, so you can archive it once testing is complete (as it is no longer needed at that point).
Step 5: Test importing from the new RSS feed with a limited number of posts
Do this:
In the new CMS, limit the number of posts in the RSS feed to a small number, then resume automatic updates on the Blog Stream to test the import.
- In the RSS feed settings for your blog, set the number of posts to a small number (under 10).
- In Uberflip, resume automatic updates on the connected Blog Stream. To do so, simply follow the instructions in Step 1 again, and turn Pause automatic updating of this Stream back to the off setting.
Why?
Limiting the number of posts in the RSS feed will ensure that only a small amount of posts will be imported into your Uberflip Blog Stream once you resume automatic updates. This helps to minimize the impact in case the GUID formats were not matched correctly, which would cause duplicate content to be imported.
Step 6: Increase the number of posts in the RSS feed
Do this:
As a final step, once you have confirmed that no duplicate content is being brought into Uberflip, increase the number of posts in the RSS feed to the normal amount.
Why?
The maximum number of posts that Uberflip can import from your blog is limited in part by the number of posts included in the blog's RSS feed (up to a maximum of 200). By increasing the number of posts in the RSS feed, you can not only ensure that all new posts are brought in to the Blog Stream, but also that older posts in the Stream can be updated automatically if you modify the corresponding posts in the original blog (as long as the post is still in the RSS feed).
Option 2: Move an external blog into Uberflip
Use this migration procedure if:
You are currently hosting your blog on a service outside Uberflip (like a CMS), and want to host your blog directly in Uberflip.
Info
This migration procedure assumes that:
- You are winding down your existing CMS or other service that currently hosts your blog (or are migrating just the blog off this service while still maintaining it for other uses).
- Your existing CMS is still online.
- You will continue to maintain the blog, and want to use Uberflip's built-in blogging functions to create all further posts on this blog.
Step 1: Pause automatic updates on the Blog Stream
Do this:
Pause automatic updates on the Blog Stream that imports content from the blog that you are moving to Uberflip.
- In Uberflip, go to the Content section.
- Click on the Blog Stream that pulls in posts from your current CMS to open it.
- Click on the Options tab.
- Turn on the option Pause automatic updating of this Stream.
Why?
This will stop the Blog Stream from pulling in further content from the old CMS while you migrate the blog to Uberflip. As you will be blogging in Uberflip, this function is no longer necessary, and turning it off can help to avoid accidentally creating duplicate content.
Step 2: Migrate images
Do this:
If you are using your old CMS to host the images used in your blog, migrate the images to Uberflip.
- To migrate images from your old CMS to Uberflip hosting, install and use the Image Migrator app. You can download it from the Uberflip Marketplace here.
- See this article for instructions on how to use Image Migrator. Note especially the requirements for both your Uberflip account and for images before proceeding.
Info
If your Uberflip account does not meet the requirements to use Image Migrator (e.g. API access), speak with your Uberflip representative to arrange temporary access.
Why?
If you host blog images on your CMS, those images will no longer be available when you take the CMS out of service, which results in broken images in your blog posts. To ensure images remain available, you must migrate them to be hosted in Uberflip.
The Image Migrator app is designed specifically for this purpose. It downloads all of the blog post images from your old CMS and uploads them to Uberflip hosting. Then, it finds image URLs that point to the old CMS in your existing Blog Stream and replaces them with new Uberflip-hosted image URLs to ensure they keep working.
Step 3: Update inline links
Do this:
Find-and-replace any inline links in your blog posts that point to the blog's old URL.
- Your Uberflip representative will do this for you: simply let them know how the URLs of inline links has changed.
- For example, if your blog used to live at the URL https://www.mycompany.com/resources/blog/, and will now live in your Uberflip Hub at https://hub.mycompany.com/blog/, then any link in your old blog posts like www.mycompany.com/resources/blog/example-post would need to be updated to hub.mycompany.com/blog/example-post to keep working.
Why?
When you move your blog from your CMS to Uberflip, this will change the URL where your blog is located (from the URL defined in the CMS to the URL of the Blog Stream). When you take the CMS offline, any links that point to the old URL will be broken. This includes inline links you may have included in old blog posts, i.e. links to other posts in the same blog. To ensure these links keep working, you need to find-and-replace links that point to the old URL so that they point to the new URL instead. As this may involve searching many hundreds of blog posts for affected links, Uberflip is able to automate this action for you.