I’ve been a bit quiet lately and that is due to a major UX Redesign (and a surgery). The UX Redesign has been a lot of fun flushing out designs, taxonomy changes, site structure, page design, etc. During this process, it reoccurred to me how great Sitecore is for developing migration tools. I’m going to talk through a few tools I built that saved me a lot of time. Currently no plans to post the code as these are more one off solutions – but if interested hit me up and I’m happy to share! Taxonomy Tool
Purpose: Applied various tagging options based on an existing taxonomy.
Options:
Sitecore Path: path in which to crawl and apply the logic to.
Function: Add Where, Replace Where, Remove Tag
Match Tag: Guid to look for
Replacement Tag: Guid to apply based on function selected
Test Run: checkbox to see the impact of what you are executing
This allowed Mathematica to spin up a new version of their taxonomy without impacting the existing taxonomy that is in place on the website. Since there is a logic mapping for over 80% of the new taxonomy (renames, location shifts, etc.), this saved a ton of effort with editors having to tag the thousands of pieces of content.
Regrets: Not making this run as a batch job that reads an Excel file. Only had to run manually once, but if it needed to be more often, the batch job concept would’ve been an improvement.
404 Site Comparison Tool
Purpose: Programmatic way of flushing out all 404 redirects that will be needed for the new site when we cut over.
Options:
Old Site Path: Old site in which to crawl descendants
New Site Path: New site in which to check if the item exists
This allowed Mathematica the ability to flush out ALL 404 redirects that would be required for launch. Handling programmatically meant that there would be no missed redirects. This saved the editors from manually determining where 404 redirects would be needed. Ultimately I used this output for my next tool to create the redirect items.
Redirect Creation Tool
Purpose: Takes an excel spreadsheet and creates the redirect item needed for the redirect manager.
Options:
Redirect Import File: Excel file with column 1 being the relative url to look for and column 2 set to the item path to redirect to.
This tool saved Mathematica time in manually create an item for each row in the spreadsheet. It took minutes instead of hours to create all the 404 redirects needed for the project!
Throughout this process, Sitecore flexibility and ease of programmatic extension really shined. As I half-jokingly say “If you have a problem, yo Sitecore will solve it”. I leave out the part about my DJ revolving it ;-)
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