Introduction to re-platforming

Simeon GriggsPrincipal Educator at Sanity

Knut MelværHead of Developer Community and Education

This course is for everyone planning to move out of an old CMS and into a modern content infrastructure like Sanity. Moving the content is but just a part of a successful re-platforming project: A re-platforming project is a great opportunity to structure your content to get more out of it and to sharpen your content workflows and collaboration.

This course will give you confidence to plan and execute a re-platforming project. It’s aimed at anyone responsible for—or affected by—such a project. You can also run it as a workshop for your whole team. This course pairs well with the more technical and hands-on Refactoring content for migration and Migrating content from WordPress to Sanity courses.

There might be many reasons for re-platforming your content, including:

• Your current CMS is outdated, insecure, or no longer supported
• Your current CMS is too expensive to maintain or upgrade
• It's hard to get the right competency for your current CMS/technical stack
• Your CMS doesn't allow for content reuse
• You want to adopt an API-first content architecture to enable multiple front-ends
• You need more flexibility and customization in your content model
• You want to improve the authoring experience for your content editors
• You're looking to integrate with best-of-breed services for key functionality

But such a project might also feel like a massive undertaking with many risks (let's be honest, it can be risky!), especially when you have a lot of existing content, functionality, and integrations that need to be migrated. Thus, a re-platforming project shouldn’t be taken lightly.

For the investment to be worth it and pay the dividends you're hoping for, a re-platforming project should help you get more out of your content, let your team move faster, spend more time building and innovating, and spend less time working around or against legacy technology.

With some planning and intentionality, a re-platforming project is an opportunity to drastically improve how much you can get out of your content and how efficiently your developers, designers, and content creators can work. So, you can go from reacting to innovating. With this mindset, the project can be exciting!

It’s important to stress that even though every re-platforming project is unique, there are common challenges and approaches that we have seen work for numerous customers of all shapes and sizes throughout the years. This course is built on those experiences.

After taking this course, you should be ready to work and move things over from your legacy CMS to Sanity. Refactoring content for migration and Migrating content from WordPress to Sanity are companion courses that teach developers how to do content migrations from other content management systems. These courses will teach transferable skills for migrating from other CMSes like WordPress, Drupal, Adobe Experience Manager, SiteCore, etc.

Enough preamble‚ let’s dive in!