In late 2022 MCC decided to migrate its public website to the General Service Administration’s (GSA) cloud.gov/pages platform in order to save a significant amount of money on web hosting.
The Challenge
At the time, MCC’s website used WordPress and had done so for roughly six years. The GSA solution is a Markdown-based, database-free one using Decap as its content management system. Making this switch meant:
- recoding 160+ templates,
- recreating the existing content model in Decap,
- exporting nearly 7,000 pieces of content,
- running those content exports through code to make a Markdown file for each content element,
- ensuring relationships between content elements would be maintained, and
- ensuring URLs would stay the same, or if not, devise a automatic redirect solution.
The Solution
With a nine month project plan, a full-time developer and a content manager, the three of us executed the migration successfully, including:
- recoding 160+ templates,
- rewriting CSS using SASS and integration the US Web Design System,
- recreating the website’s content model in Decap,
- exporting nearly 7,000 pieces of content and them them through a customized JavaScript to create a Markdown file for each content element,
- ensuring relationships between content elements were maintained, and
- ensuring URLs would stay the same.
Final Product
Organization
MCC