Automatic content migration from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS

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1 Masaryk University Faculty of Informatics Automatic content migration from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS Master s Thesis Tomáš Hrubý Brno, Spring 2016

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3 Masaryk University Faculty of Informatics Automatic content migration from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS Master s Thesis Tomáš Hrubý Brno, Spring 2016

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5 Replace this page with a copy of the official signed thesis assignment and the copy of the Statement of an Author.

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7 Declaration Hereby I declare that this paper is my original authorial work, which I have worked out on my own. All sources, references, and literature used or excerpted during elaboration of this work are properly cited and listed in complete reference to the due source. Tomáš Hrubý Advisor: doc. RNDr. Tomáš Pitner, Ph.D i

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9 Acknowledgement I wish to thank the people who helped with the professional realization of my thesis. My gratitude belongs to doc. RNDr. Tomáš Pitner, Ph.D for supervising my thesis and his patient help and Ing. Zbyšek Němec for his subject matter advice during the implementation. iii

10 Abstract The aim of this thesis is to explore the possibilities of migrating content from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS and implement a migration tool that helps migrate the content automatically. The thesis provides an overview of both Kentico CMS and Kentico Draft functionality followed by a description of the manual migration problem. After analyzing migration use cases comes the technical implementation which reveals all technical decisions and patterns in the migration tool. For a seamless installation, a tutorial is provided. iv

11 Keywords Content management system, Content migration, Web design process, Kentico CMS, Kentico Draft, Kentico Custom module, REST API v

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13 Contents 1 Introduction Content production with Kentico platform Kentico EMS all-in-one solution Planning phase Development phase Release phase Optimization phase Kentico Draft role in content production Content production start Collaborative space Single space for content production Summary Content production downsides Manual processes Possible solutions Automating the manual process Summary Automatic content migration Overview of Kentico Draft entities Content inventory setup Content types Sitemap Workflow step Users Content inventory Content inventory overview Minimum viable migration Typical import scenario Importing content types Importing categories Importing pages Implementation requirements Use case 1 bulk import Use case 2 amend existing page Use case 3 repeating the import vii

14 4.6 Summary Technical implementation Kentico interfaces Kentico Draft REST interface Kentico CMS REST API Kentico CMS Integration BUS Custom module in Kentico CMS Summary Custom module architecture High-level overview Kentico Draft SDK Import Jobs Import manager Custom module core Custom module UI Automatic tests coverage Unit vs. integration Preparing the test environment Implemented tests Summary Next steps Tutorial Installing the import module Importing content entries Configuring mapping Conclusion Bibliography viii

15 List of Figures 2.1 Configuring a page template in Kentico CMS Overview of web project redesign The Bad and the good start of content production An example of a content type An example of a sitemap Assigning content entry to a contributor Mapping of a content type and a page type. 49 ix

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17 1 Introduction Digital marketing agencies help businesses succeed in their commercial mission. They contribute to transforming the original off-line product-oriented business into a digital customer-oriented presentation of the company. In order to successfully plan and execute a marketing strategy, the digital marketing agency must closely collaborate with their clients, understand their business, their customers, their needs. However, their client s employees are busy with their ordinary jobs and may not be on the same level of technological maturity as the agency. On the other hand, they must exchange many documents agency needs to educate the business as well as business needs to participate in creating a strategy and content for the new website or mobile application. This collaboration is often exhausting on both sides and merely effective. There are many tools out there on the market for helping creating and managing a digital business. They can be found by many names Content Management System, Web Content Management, Customer Experience Management... Since the whole process is very complex, every tool focuses on a specific part of the process and helps automating it and making it more efficient. One such process is creating, managing and adjusting content for a digital presentation (a website or a mobile application). Most common name for this kind of tools is Content Management System (CMS). There is a lot of CMS vendors such as Kentico, Sitefinity, Drupal or else. This thesis focuses on a single CMS vendor Kentico [1]. Apart from authoring content and composing website design, Kentico CMS provides tools for creating a marketing strategy by defining personas and how they behave in the customer lifecycle, binding specific content to specific personas and creating a content strategy. On top of that, the efficiency of a particular content or design can be tested and optimized over time. On one hand, a CMS does its best in managing a running website, creating individual pages and measuring marketing efficiency. On the contrary, content still needs to be created, reviewed by all relevant parties and put into the CMS where it gets the final look. This is the domain of content collation tools. Typical representatives of such applications are GatherContent or Kentico Draft [2]. This thesis focuses 1

18 1. Introduction on Kentico Draft since it is from the same vendor as Kentico CMS. It helps to deliver content on time by improving collaboration of content strategists, content writers, content reviewers, legal department and much more. It helps to minimize delays in the digital marketing agency projects. Content production is kicked off early enough, and content is written, reviewed and revised in Kentico Draft. At the same time, web developers are configuring Kentico CMS and setting up custom functionality and how the content will be displayed. However, when content is finished in Kentico Draft and web developer needs to put it to CMS to test that it is displayed correctly, the content needs to be migrated manually. This costs the developer and though the agency a lot of extra time. The aim of this thesis is to provide an automatic migration tool that helps shorten time spent on manual copying the content from Kentico CMS to Kentico Draft. The tool needs to save as much time as possible and needs to be easy and intuitive to use for the web developer. Since it is to be deployed in production, it needs to be thoroughly tested. Kentico Draft consists of many entities and many content writing scenarios. Some tasks could be done manually because they are either one-off tasks or they take minutes to complete. To figure out what is what, I started this thesis with analyzing the whole content production process and the role of Kentico Draft and Kentico CMS in it. This led to identifying most time demanding actions in the content migration process. Out of all entities, migrating content entries take the most time, since migrating a single entry takes on average 20 minutes. On the other hand, entities like Content types can be migrated manually because it takes just a couple of minutes to migrate them. When the use cases were clear, I analyzed how a migration tool can be built. Kentico CMS provides different channels for inserting content, such as REST API, Integration BUS or a Custom module. Since a Custom module can be directly accessed in Kentico CMS, I took this way. The thesis concerns the analysis of all development decisions. I created a suit of providers for both ends of communication Kentico Draft SDK and Import jobs for inserting content into Kentico CMS. An Import Manager orchestrates the providers and exposes their functionality intuitively via a Kentico CMS custom module UI. The result of this thesis is a well tested automatic migration tool that helps web developers to migrate content from Kentico Draft to 2

19 1. Introduction Kentico CMS automatically. The tool environment should be familiar to Kentico web developers since all things are configured in a standard Kentico Custom module. The initial chapter of this thesis explains the content production process and involvement of Kentico CMS and Kentico Draft in it. The next chapter explores manual parts of the web design process which neither of the mentioned platforms covers. The chapter after that provides a deep analysis of Kentico Draft entities and what content migration use cases are most time consuming. The fourth chapter is devoted to the technical implementation and justifying all development decisions. In the last two chapters, possible future improvements are discussed and a short installation and usage tutorial is provided. 3

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21 2 Content production with Kentico platform From all aspects of website development, content production is probably the most important one. Not only because there s a conventional term content is king but also because the content is the key driver in website visitor s choices [3]. By reading a piece of text or seeing a short video, an incoming visitor decides whether to stay or leave the website. On the other hand, a handful of marketing materials about your product features determine whether you win or lose your potential customer. There are whole teams that oversee content strategy and execution. The larger the team is, the more complicated the collaboration over content becomes. And imagine you don t only have internal teams inside companies, but also across companies. Based on my interviews with Kentico account managers, a typical mid-market company 1 has their brand or online presentation build by a digital marketing agency. This agency designs develops and optimizes their website. However, the agency can t create the website alone because the company is the bearer of the domain knowledge and the industrial know-how. Since the content is so much important, there are hundreds of applications called Content Management Systems (CMS) and applications that assist them in copywriting, marketing or else. Kentico is one of the companies that dedicated its existence to helping digital agencies and businesses of all sizes succeed in their online presentation and content production. 2.1 Kentico EMS all-in-one solution Kentico is called many names. It is a Content Management System as well as an Enterprise Marketing solution or a Customer Experience Management tool. Basically, it is a universal, all-in-one solution for digital agencies. To make things easier, let s use a universal name for it Kentico CMS. To give you a hint about how Kentico CMS helps 1. A mid-market company is a medium-sized company, usually one with 10 to 100 employees and revenues of $10 million to $50 million. They collectively employ more people than large companies, and usually have a less formal structure [4]. 5

22 2. Content production with Kentico platform digital agencies, I ll portray a typical web design project and explain how Kentico CMS can be used at each stage Planning phase First of all, a company reaches out to a digital agency. They want to design a new website or redesign the old one. They agree on a deal and as soon as the project starts, agency begins researching company business model, their marketing strategy, content strategy, target audience and many other things. This is usually called the planning phase. Digital agency meets their clients and together they go back and forth to create initial information architecture of the website, initial design mockups and define personas that the marketing strategy will focus on. The output of the planning phase is also a clear understanding of roles in the project, who does what and by when. Last but not least, a content structure is defined. Digital agency decomposes the website into smaller pieces of content with fixed structure and then combines these content modules to compose individual pages. Kentico usually doesn t play any role in this phase, but it s crucial to understand it to have a clear picture of the whole project lifecycle Development phase After the planning phase follows the development of all things that have been planned. This is the longest phase and many things need to be done. Following set of tasks represent a typical development routine of a web redesign project: 6 Developers transform design mockups into page layouts and templates as shown in the figure 2.1 Developers transform content structures into page types. Content writers write all content and put it into the CMS. Testers check that all content fits the templates. Marketers set up analytics on the content.

23 2. Content production with Kentico platform Figure 2.1: Configuring a page template in Kentico CMS Note that some tasks can t be done simultaneously. For example putting content into CMS depends on content types being configured. Then, the final testing must wait until all changes are made Release phase All things should be done by now and properly tested. Digital agency releases the website, new visitors come and client pops a champagne. Also, from now on, Kentico CMS collects strategic and statistical data about the website, which will be a subject for further optimization. 7

24 2. Content production with Kentico platform Optimization phase After a website is released, digital marketers collect the analytics data and try to improve content and design effectivity. A common first step is that based on the data, marketers find weak spots of the website regarding customer conversion rate or number of visitors. Then, if they don t have any research to back it all up, they guess what change would improve the conversion or visit and create a new version of the content or a new layout. This is called an A/B test if they test only 2 variants or a Multivariate test if they test more [5]. Typically, only a single small unit of content or design is changed across the variants, so that the test results are not misleading and at the end the marketers know that the particular change improved the conversion. This is an ongoing infinite process. Kentico CMS provides a suite of on-line marketing features to support A/B and Multivariate testing and other things like visitor segmentation or content personalization [6]. Another way to improve the number of visitors is to write new content. Typically, this is done purely by the business, not the agency. Subject matter experts together with marketers deliver new content and measure its marketing performance. The result of the optimization phase new content or design is, in fact, created using the same workflow. There is a short planning, development, and release phase. And on it goes until the next new redesign, where the old site is completely revamped and the whole digital marketing strategy is streamlined. The figure 2.2 portrays the web project (re)design process. Now, let s look closer at the content production process and what is the role of Kentico Draft in it. 2.2 Kentico Draft role in content production There are many reasons why the execution of a web redesign project fails and the project is delayed. One of the most common is late content delivery. Since content is provided by the client, the collaboration over it is time demanding and not very swift. Also, content is usually not ready for production right the first time. However, the release of the website is blocked by content production and thus, content production 8

25 2. Content production with Kentico platform Figure 2.2: Overview of web project redesign may block the whole project. There are few tools for optimizing content production. The top two are Kentico Draft and GatherContent [7]. Since Kentico Draft is from the Kentico product family it tends to be more usable with Kentico CMS and we re going to look how it addresses the content production delays issue Content production start This risk of delaying the project is caused by content production not being started soon enough. Let s take a look at when the agency is able to kick off the content production. A CMS is a complex system that requires some time for configuration. Agency must develop the content structure in the CMS so that there s everything up and running for the content writers. Otherwise, content writers would work in a wobbly environment with lots of defects and work in progress. Even if they agree to work in such environment, agency developer risks that content writers accidentally break something, since development is still in progress. Therefore, the agency doesn t want to let client in before everything is properly configured. To solve this 9

26 2. Content production with Kentico platform Figure 2.3: The Bad and the good start of content production problem, the content production must start right after the planning phase and not lately in the development phase. The figure 2.3 displays the bad and the good approach on when a content production should start Collaborative space Since content production must start before CMS is even configured, the agency must use another tool or platform to provide a collaborative space for content writers. The obvious, but unfortunately, the most common platform for this is word documents and excel spreadsheets. Therefore, the agency puts down their content requirements into spreadsheets. These are sent over to the client through . 10

27 2. Content production with Kentico platform Like this, documents are scattered all over the place. Nobody knows what s the latest version of the document. There s simply no single place to store all information about the ongoing content production. Then, the defined structure is static and merely flexible. Once you want to change the structure, you need to change numerous word documents and spreadsheets and send updates to all people involved in the process. The last major issue is the lack of control over the content production process. Nobody has a clear understanding of how much work is done and how long it will take to finish the content production. Well, this is a nightmare for digital agencies. A foundation of successful digital agency is its effectivity in resource management. The approach mentioned above disables assigning agency employees to work on multiple projects at once. A project manager doesn t know how many people are needed to finish the project A, therefore, the agency can t employ a new project B. Like this, the agency loses opportunities Single space for content production Kentico Draft provides a single space for content production where everyone involved in the content production has a clear understanding of who, how and when the content has to be delivered [2]. The agency can define content requirements so that the content is neatly structured and aligned with company content strategy. Right after the planning phase, agencies can put all content requirements into Kentico Draft and kick off the content production process. The development phase then takes place parallel to the content production which lowers the risk of delaying the web redesign project. After all content is finished in Kentico Draft, it can be migrated to a CMS where it can be properly tested with the templates and on all devices. Now, let s briefly take a look how a web redesign process looks with Kentico Draft. It is crucial to know when the content production takes place and when there s need to migrate content to a CMS. 1. Planning phase remains the same as without Kentico Draft. This is because the requirements are done separately. To remind what exactly is done in this phase, agency and client agree on content 11

28 2. Content production with Kentico platform strategy, information architecture, content structure and task and responsibilities of individual roles in the digital agency and the company. 2. The main difference is in the Development phase which begins with putting all requirements into Kentico Draft. Agency creates content types out of content structure from the planning phase and assigns who has to write individual pieces by when. Agency specifies all roles that need to review the written content, such as Legal department, SEO specialist, Content editor. Since work CMS development is separated from content production, the agency can develop the website in the CMS section by section, set the deadlines for content in individual sections accordingly and bring in the content from Kentico Draft to the CMS once a single section is finished. This process is more agile and iterative than it was without Kentico Draft. 3. Release and Optimization phase remain the same as without Kentico Draft since Kentico Draft is abandoned once all content is in CMS. 2.3 Summary To wrap things up, in this introductory chapter you were provided with an overview of the content production process with Kentico CMS and Kentico Draft. Kentico Draft revolutionizes content production and makes it more agile and iterative. It enables digital agencies to specify content requirements early in the web redesign project right after the planning phase. It provides agencies and their clients with a clear overview of the content production process, specifying who has to deliver what and by when. The whole development phase is done iteratively, section by section. This enables agency web developers to configure CMS and develop visual part of the project uninterrupted by the content writer presence in the CMS. On the other hand, it enables content writers to work in a defectless, stable and robust environment right from the beginning. 12

29 3 Content production downsides After providing an introduction to the web design process and the content production process, we re going to look at the manual parts of these processes in a short research chapter. Every part of the web design process could be done manually. The purpose of the tools like Draft is to streamline that process and enable the digital agency to employ more projects and to invest their assets in other parts of the project. 3.1 Manual processes Out of the four content production phases planning, development, release, optimization content collation tools such as GatherContent or Kentico Draft optimize the planning and the development phase. On the other hand, following processes are still done manually: Content auditing: discovering content on the existing web site, exploring its original purpose and mapping it to the new website. Then, every piece of content is rewritten, remained or dropped. All content that has to be rewritten can be inserted to Kentico Draft and its content production comfortably kicked off. The content which is to be remained can be migrated directly to CMS or to Kentico Draft as well. However, based on my interviews with Kentico account managers, the auditing is still done manually using spreadsheets or other documents which agencies and their clients send back and forth using . Content migration to CMS: After content is finished and approved in Kentico Draft, it has to be inserted to CMS, where the developers enhance it with the visual design. Basically, content collation tools optimize the content production but don t bother with how the content gets into the tool or out of the tool. 13

30 3. Content production downsides 3.2 Possible solutions A great source of inspiration is how tools that store content deal with the content migration (inward or outward) today. Following approaches were adopted: Common format: Converting content to a platform-agnostic format. Then, letting client download such content. Most common formats are CSV or spreadsheets. Clients can then import a CSV into another system which parses the common format and converts it into its own format. For example Kentico CMS import-export works this way [8]. Content API: A more technical way of migrating content is to provide a public API for inserting into or pulling from a content collation tool. Digital agency developers could scrape all content from the old website and insert the content into a content collation tool using the API [9]. Similarly, the developers could script the content out of the content collation tool and insert it into CMS programmatically. This approach has been adopted by CMS as well, usually in the form of a REST API. Connectors & Plugins: In pluggable platforms such as Kentico CMS or Sitecore [10], vendors can build their own applications which provide a nice UI for content migration for non-technical people which need to migrate content from or to another tool. 3.3 Automating the manual process Now, let s look at how previously mentioned manual processes could be automated. Content auditing is a complex process concerning collaboration of various roles and mapping content to marketing personas and content strategy. Therefore, we ll focus on the second problem migrating content from a content collation tool to a CMS. And since we already know the process behind Kentico CMS and Kentico Draft, we ll use them platforms for this thesis. Content in Kentico Draft is neatly structured and every content element has to be copied and pasted manually to Kentico CMS including all images and other files. After talking to Kentico account 14

31 3. Content production downsides managers about the content migration cost, every agency has its own pace but on average, it takes 30 minutes to properly migrate a single page of content. Every part of the page structure have to be copied individually and it must be visually tested for potential text mutations. For example, a person responsible for content migration must check that there are no characters which have been unexpectedly escaped. When you multiply the 30 minutes per page by a typical 80 pages per website, you can add a week to your timeline. 3.4 Summary The content collation tools such as GatherContent or Kentico Draft don t solve the problem of inserting audited content into the tool or getting finished content out of the tool. Therefore, there is a lot of space for efficiency improvements on both sides. Since exporting content from a content collation tool is a more straightforward problem, we ll focus on it in the rest of this thesis. Clearly, an automated content migration from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS is a challenge but would save a week of extra effort for each web design project. 15

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33 4 Automatic content migration Now, when the motivation to build an automatic content migration tool is clear, let s proceed to a step, where we define specifics of the migration. In order to design a viable content migration, it s necessary to fully understand what objects is Kentico Draft composed of and what is the typical manual migration scenario. The first and the second part of this chapter is dedicated to entities in Kentico Draft. We can split entities into two major parts content inventory setup and content inventory items. The setup part holds configuration data, which are created at the beginning and in most cases remain untouched until the content production is finished. The content inventory items are entities which are frequently changed. Basically, it is the content itself. After you have a clear picture of Kentico Draft composition, this chapter provides you with a typical scenario how content writers or developers migrate content manually from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS. 4.1 Overview of Kentico Draft entities The best way how to picture Kentico Draft entities is to align them with a timeline of a web redesign project. Kentico Draft consists of content types, sitemap, workflow, people, content entries. Let me first portray you an order in which these entities are manipulated and then jump into a detailed description of every entity. Digital agency starts using Kentico Draft at the end of the planning phase. Since then, the agency manipulates entities in Kentico Draft in the following way: 1. Agency creates Content types out of HTML design mockups. 2. Agency configures Sitemap so that every piece of content is easy to find. 3. Agency configures Workflow so that it is aligned with their web redesign process and all relevant parties are included in the review process. 17

34 4. Automatic content migration 4. Agency invites People from the Client company that will contribute to the content production. 5. Client copywriters, marketing managers, lawyers and Agency specialists like SEO specialists, or content strategists contribute to the content production by creating and reviewing Content entries. After all content entries are finished, content production ends and all content is transferred to a CMS. So let s now dive into individual Kentico Draft entities so that we fully understand them before we proceed to design the automatic content migration tool. 4.2 Content inventory setup Initially, a Digital agency must set up a content inventory so that everything goes according to the plan of the content production. This covers most of the steps (1-4) from the entities timeline. The client is usually not included in the content inventory setup because the Digital agency has more experience working with Kentico Draft on content production and knows best practices Content types The first entity being set up is the content type. Content types define the structure of the content. The source of the structure are currently the HTML design mockups done in the planning phase. Both the agency and the Client agreed on what types of content the new website will be composed of. Content types are composed of smaller content elements. Content elements define units of content production such as a title of an article, a banner image etc. There are following types of content elements currently in Kentico Draft: Text, Rich text, Number, Date & time, Asset, Related content, and Guidelines. These content types are used in the following way: 18 Text elements are commonly used for short text such as an article title or person s name

35 4. Automatic content migration Rich text elements are like Text elements, but the text can be enriched with some formatting. Kentico Draft Rich text editor allows only basic formatting and omits common features of MS Word-like editors such as text positioning, text flow because the text in Kentico Draft should be kept as clean as possible and additional positioning should be done by web developers in a CMS. Rich text elements are used for longer text such as article body copy. Number elements are used for decimal values like a price. Date & time elements are common in events or courses for specifying a start date or an end date. Asset elements represent all types of files. It can be used for media fields like article images or videos, or case study materials like PDFs. Related content elements define relationships between content entries. Such relationships are used for linking a blog post to some related blog posts. But, more interestingly, related content can link modular content entries into a larger piece of content. For larger pages, like home pages, which contain numerous content blocks, Agency can define a content type for every individual content block and a content type for the whole home page and then link individual content blocks to a home page. Like this, all content is modular, reusable and better manageable. Guidelines elements are not part of the standard website content. The agency can include some instructions for content writers such as voice and tone guidelines, recommended terminology or even a picture of the HTML design mockup so that content writers know how the piece they re writing will look at the output. These guidelines are read-only for the content writers. Every content element consists of a name and optional guidelines. These, compared to the auxiliary Guidelines content element are specific for the content element. This way, the agency can include some instructions for individual content elements such as max character count restrictions. An example content type is shown in the figure

36 4. Automatic content migration Figure 4.1: An example of a content type Sitemap After content types are set up agency configures a Sitemap. Sitemap is a hierarchical structure of nodes with a name. Every content entry can be assigned to a location in the sitemap. It helps categorize content entries so that content writers can find content entries more easily. It also helps content writers to better imagine where the individual pieces will be in the CMS and though on the website. Most probably, the sitemap copies the content tree in a CMS (Kentico CMS). It may also categorize content based on an Information architecture 1 [11]. A typical sitemap is shown in figure 4.2 In Kentico Draft, a sitemap also supports the modular content approach. As mentioned before a large page can consist of multiple 1. Information Architecture is a categorization of all content on the website. Individual pieces of content are connected to create a logical hierarchy of information. This helps web designers better imagine how the information will be aligned and what will be the links between pieces of content. 20

37 4. Automatic content migration Figure 4.2: An example of a sitemap content entries. These content entries can be assigned to the same sitemap location, which represents the actual page Workflow step Well structured and described content types and a sitemap are necessary to kick off a successful content production. However every content entry has to be reviewed by all relevant parties and then migrated to a CMS. This means that a content entry has multiple states during its lifecycle. And this is what workflow steps are for. Digital agency creates workflow steps for all necessary steps that a content entry need to pass and aligns them to a linear workflow. A typical content production workflow can look like the following in Kentico Draft Users After content types, a sitemap and a workflow have been configures, agency can start inviting people to contribute to the project. There are 21

38 4. Automatic content migration 2 types of roles: owner and contributor. This is a very minimalistic role model, but suitable for a separate process such as content production. An owner is only one and has rights to manage projects. When all contributors have been invited, Kentico Draft is ready for a content production kick-off. 4.3 Content inventory One of the biggest advantages of using Kentico Draft is that it is a single space for everything in the content production. Every action, every task is in a single place. And that place is a content inventory. It contains all the necessary content for the web redesign project content entries. Content entries are instances of content types. They contain the same content elements, but this time for content writers to fill in the content. All guidelines defined in content types are displayed so that a content writer writes high-quality content from the first line. Content entries are then linked to all other entities from content inventory configuration. They have a workflow status and assignees. To have a clear picture of how agency project managers and client copywriters work with content entries, let me portray a typical content entry lifecycle: Agency project manager creates an empty content entry, gives it a name, assigns it to a position in the sitemap so that it is easy to find and kick off the task of writing this entry by assigning it to a content writer. When assigning the content entry to content writers, the project manager can also leave them a note and set a due date as shown in the figure Content writers are notified about the unfinished work, so they start working on the content. They fill in all content elements and follow the guidelines provided by the agency. After they re done with it, they change the workflow status to Ready for review and assign it to a reviewer. 3. The assigned reviewer is notified that the piece is finished and needs review. The reviewer is able to comment on individual

39 4. Automatic content migration Figure 4.3: Assigning content entry to a contributor pieces of text or on files and point out what has to be changed. If the reviewer considers the entry unfinished, he assigns the content writers again. After this whole review loop is over and all pending comments are resolved, the reviewer moves the content entry to the next person in the workflow. And this goes on and on until the content entry reaches Approved for import step. 4. The migration to a CMS is currently manual. When it is finished, the content entry is assigned to the Done workflow step. 23

40 4. Automatic content migration And this is repeated for every content entry that needs to be delivered. Agency can also adopt a more iterative approach and create a bulk of tasks for a section of the website, wait until it s finished and then move on. Kentico Draft makes the collaboration easy through assigning people, having conversations over content using comments and having everything in one place for the project manager. A project manager can always log in to Kentico Draft and check the progress of the content writers in the tool. Then, he can assimilate the agency human resources accordingly Content inventory overview One detail that isn t obvious but is crucial for designing the automatic content migration tool is how people click through to the content. Kentico Draft offers filtering content inventory by a workflow status, by a contributor and by a position in the sitemap. One thing that is missing here is filtering by a content type. These are all possibilities and we ll choose one or more of them in the following part of this chapter, which finally reveals the design of the import functionality. 4.4 Minimum viable migration With sufficient knowledge about Kentico Draft usage, a viable content migration tool can be designed. However, one last piece of the puzzle is who and how is going to migrate the content from Kentico Draft to Kentico CMS. First, let s finalize the analysis part of this thesis with portraying a typical import scenario. Then let s look at the requirements for the implementation followed by the actual implementation Typical import scenario Now, let s imagine a digital agency is building an Information System for a university. The university agreed on the website Information Architecture and the types of content for the website. Agency created content briefs and assigned content tasks to the university content writers. Therefore, the content production is in progress and the agency developers preparing the CMS. They must do the following steps: 24

41 4. Automatic content migration Implement a custom functionality in Kentico CMS student management. Students are entities that are managed separately in another system. However, students are a part of website information since they are authors of some articles. Therefore, there needs to be a place in Kentico for viewing all users, picking a user as an author. Some content writers won t have permission to access the student system, but they ll need to change user description. Developers need to extend the standard Kentico CMS administration UI and functionality and create a management app for the content writers to manage the students inside Kentico CMS. Create Page types for all types of content there are going to be in the Information System. Compared to the custom functionality, Kentico CMS automatically creates all necessary administration UI. Code Page templates for all page types. The Page templates define how the individual elements are aligned on the page. Typically, there s plenty of Page templates, because they vary from website section to website section even for the same Page type. The Page templates are inspired by the HTML design mockups from the planning phase. Configure Categories in Kentico CMS. Page categories help to suggest relevant content and better navigate a visitor through the website. Create Pages with the actual content. All of the above is done in an agile iterative manner. One iteration usually covers a single website section. Therefore, Kentico Draft migration tool could help the developer in the following way: 1. Merge students data in Kentico Draft with students data in Kentico CMS which were originally in the student system. Like this, content writers which have only access to Kentico Draft can enhance students data with some marketing content. 25

42 4. Automatic content migration 2. Automatically create page types in Kentico CMS from content types in Kentico Draft. Since Kentico CMS provides more data types for page type fields than Kentico Draft for content elements, there may be some manual fine-tuning after the automatic import. 3. Automatically create categories based on the sitemap from Kentico Draft. The sitemap is the only hierarchical structure capable of providing nested categories in Kentico Draft. 4. Automatically create pages in Kentico CMS based on content entries in Kentico Draft. Since defining how the content looks is not a part of Kentico Draft offer, it s meaningless to import page templates in any way. Now, let s look at how much time the automatic migration tool is capable of saving Importing content types Content types can be imported into Kentico CMS to create a page type or a custom table. This action is done once per each section if no two sections share a page type, which is not common. From my experience, configuring a content type with 6 fields took me about 20 minutes. Let s say a website has 15 different content types, then time spent on configuring them manually is only 5 hours. Of course, after importing content types into page types manually, page types need to be checked, which takes some time as well. All in all, this task can be done manually without delaying the website project Importing categories Setting up the categories is also done once for the whole project. More time consuming than creating categories is assigning pages to categories. Therefore, let s also keep creating categories a manual process Importing pages The most time-consuming part of the content migration is importing content entries from Kentico Draft into pages in Kentico CMS. Every 26

43 4. Automatic content migration agency has its own pace, but from the experience of Kentico account managers, a common time spent on copying the content manually and checking the result is 30 minutes per page. It includes assigning a page into categories, linking all media from a Media library, assigning a page template and verifying that the page template displays the actual content correctly. Let s say a website contains more than 80 pages. Then the content migration costs the agency more than 40 hours of manual copy-pasting. 4.5 Implementation requirements Now, we re going to design the migration tool functionality by merging the knowledge about web design process, Kentico Draft, and Kentico CMS into use cases. Following use cases cover the most timedemanding parts of the development phase Use case 1 bulk import Firstly, a developer needs to bring over the whole section of content and turn it into Kentico CMS pages. Namely, he needs to do the following: 1. Select content entries from Kentico Draft which will be imported. 2. Select a location in the Kentico CMS content tree where the pages will be created. 3. Select a page type which the new pages will be based on. 4. Map content type elements and page type fields so that every part of the page gets correct content. 5. Select where the assets from Kentico Draft will be stored in Kentico CMS. 6. Perform the import. 7. Check a few imported pages and see whether the import went smoothly. 27

44 4. Automatic content migration Use case 2 amend existing page Then there are pages which cannot be created automatically by the migration tool because they are linked with other Kentico objects. An example of such page type is a product page type. A product page doesn t make much sense without a product entity. Therefore, the product and its page must be created before importing content from Kentico Draft. Then, the existing pages are populated with the Draft content. In order to do so, the developer needs to do the following: 1. Select an existing page in Kentico CMS which will be filled with content. 2. Select a content entry from Kentico Draft which will be imported into the existing page. 3. Map content type elements and page type fields so that every part of the page gets correct content. 4. Select where the assets from Kentico Draft will be stored in Kentico CMS. 5. Perform the import Use case 3 repeating the import After a section of the website has been imported, there may be some requirements for updating the content. For example, the content is too long, the title is not displayed correctly on mobile devices or an image must be cropped. In such case, a developer or a project manager assigns a task to a content writer in Kentico Draft to correct the mistakes and update the content. After the content writer updates the content, the changes need to be reflected in Kentico CMS. Therefore, a developer needs to repeat an import by performing following steps: Select pages which have been already imported. 2. Repeat the import. 3. Check a few pages to make sure the content was updated correctly.

45 4. Automatic content migration 4.6 Summary To wrap things up, this chapter revealed the details of Kentico Draft and how individual entities inside it operate together. Then, by providing a clear picture of a typical import scenario we were ready to finally provide a specification for the migration tool in the form of 3 use cases. This finishes the analysis part of this thesis. 29

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47 5 Technical implementation Since this thesis is focused on the implementation as well, let s now step back from analyzing the means of automatic content migration and let s make a step towards implementing the version one of the actual automatic migration tool. The first part of this chapter is devoted to choosing the overall approach, closely followed by the architecture description and test coverage declaration. 5.1 Kentico interfaces It s crucial to choose the right interfaces to communicate with. This decision will influence the code complexity and maintainability in the future. The automatic content migration tool will require 2 interfaces, first for getting content from Kentico Draft and the second to insert content into Kentico CMS. Let s look at the available technologies to understand them better Kentico Draft REST interface Getting data from Kentico Draft is really easy. Kentico Draft is a fully RESTful application. Whole Kentico Draft application is composed of a client application and a REST API server in the background. Although the REST API 1 is not publicly documented, it s the best source of the data for the automatic content migration tool. 1. The REST is a framework, not an implementation. It is a stateless communication consisting of HTTP requests and HTTP responses. Like this, the REST servers are highly scalable. Every operation in the communication leverages HTTP properties like HTTP verbs, request headers or request body. HTTP verbs are used to define the nature of the operation, for example, POST verb represents creation in CRUD, GET verb represents retrieve, PUT verb represents update, DELETE verb represents delete. There are many other verbs but are not commonly used. The URL of the request represents an object identifier or its location. An object can be a collection of entities, entity alone or its single attribute. You can also specify some metadata in the HTTP headers such as pagination. Finally, the HTTP request or response body represents the data serialized to XML or JSON format (specified in the content-type HTTP header). To find out more about REST, read Roy Fielding s dissertation [12]. 31

48 5. Technical implementation Every entity of Kentico Draft is accessible through a HTTP endpoint. The migration tool need only read access to these entities, therefore, the GET verb will be used almost everywhere. Entities like content types and content entries have a special scheme based on which they re transported in JSON. Apart from their schemes, both objects are encapsulated in a pagination envelope. Details of the scheme are analyzed when describing the data providers Kentico CMS REST API Kentico CMS has its own REST API too [9]. However, it is mainly used by applications outside the CMS. To provide a migration tool that is easy to use and comfortably accessible, it must be a part of the Kentico CMS interface. On top of that, HTTP requests are slower than calling the Kentico CMS API directly because of the need to use the network for data transfer Kentico CMS Integration BUS A compromise between calling a REST API from the outside and calling a physical Kentico CMS API is the Integration bus [13]. The Integration bus is used to write connectors to external systems such as CRM. It consists of a single task queue. In our case, this queue would be filled with tasks of inserting content from Kentico Draft entities into Kentico CMS pages. However, the Integration bus is asynchronous and should be used for background continual integration with 3rd party systems. Therefore, it can t be used to build a migration tool operated by a human developer because he needs to wait until the operation finishes to go and check the result. Apart from that, pages in Kentico CMS are very complex objects with a lot of bindings to other objects. Translating all these objects into an integration task without the assistance of Kentico API would require an unnecessary complex solution Custom module in Kentico CMS The most comfortable option how to create Kentico CMS objects and migrate content to them is to use the physical Kentico CMS API. It 32