Multilingual Migration from Apostrophe CMS to Storyblok

The Challenge

1NCE is a technology company based in Germany that specializes in providing IoT connectivity and software services on a global scale.

1NCE was looking to replatform from their legacy CMS Apostrophe due to following constraints:

• Content management structure inefficiencies

• Troublesome UX for content managers

• Nonexistent AI translation capabilities

9thCO assisted 1NCE in selecting a suitable CMS for replatforming, addressing content management needs, and automating data synchronization to ensure data integrity during migration.

The Solution

9thCO worked closely with the client to determine content management needs and pain points from the legacy Apostrophe CMS, map out entire schemas of datasets and content structure, define localization needs, and develop a migration strategy roadmap fully incorporating the client into the data synchronization process leading to higher transparency and data integrity. Once the entirety of the data sets and migrations expectations were set, 9thCO split the migration into three steps: initial migration and review of the main localization and assets to ensure data integrity, remaining locale migration of the remaining content, finalized manual review of content paired with automated hookup of localization mapping using Storyblok’s dimensions app.

Once our migration strategy had been formalized, 9thCO utilized our core migration script platform as a base, expanded our library of clients to include Apostrope requests, and enhanced our transformation pipeline to include restructuring Apostrophe data into the expected Storyblok outputs required for content creation. To mitigate risk, each content-type and locale were migrated individually to ensure data integrity was maintained and errors were managed appropriately. Some notable achievements throughout the process include:

• Development of an additional client library for Apostrophe

• Enhancement of a declarative pipeline promoting repeatability, observability, and safe-iteration of dynamic content following DRY principles making scalability non-issue.

• Enforcement of migration order front-loading assets and mapping components on the backend reducing dependency issues.

• Safe handling of relational data by storing reference ids within Stories and mutating data post migration to maintain content mapping integrity.

• Scaffolded to use bun for the primary runtime enhancing speed, TS bundling out-of-the-box, and built-in lightweight tooling.