CMS migration for publishers & Livingdocs development

We migrate newsrooms to modern CMS platforms — Livingdocs above all — without a lost article, a broken URL, or a day of interrupted publishing.

When a CMS migration is worth the pain

Nobody migrates a newsroom CMS for fun. The trigger is usually one of three: the legacy system can no longer serve mobile and app channels without duplicate workflows; editorial speed has collapsed under workarounds; or the vendor's roadmap and yours have diverged beyond repair. If two of those sound familiar, migration is cheaper than staying — but only if it is run as an editorial project, not an IT project.

A Livingdocs agency with production scars

Livingdocs is our first recommendation for mid-to-large publishers: a headless, editorial-first CMS with a component-based document model that maps to how newsrooms actually work. We run it in production for major DACH publishers — which means we know where the bodies are buried: include services, delivery API design, desk-based content modelling, and the editor UX details that decide whether a newsroom adopts or revolts.

We are equally pragmatic when Livingdocs is not the answer. For smaller newsrooms we deliver Litedocs, a leaner sibling, and we have migrated publishers onto headless stacks of their own choosing. The CMS decision belongs to your workflow, not our preference.

The migration method that never loses an article

Every migration we run follows the same five steps:

Content audit. We inventory every content type, field, and embed in the legacy system — including the ones nobody documented.
Model design. The new content model is validated against real articles from every desk, not against a blank page.
Migration pipeline. An automated, repeatable parse-transform-validate pipeline — never a one-off script. We migrate the full archive multiple times before cutover.
Parallel run. Old and new systems run side by side; editors validate their own desks' content with a structured acceptance process.
Cutover with rollback. DNS-level switch with a tested rollback path. Every URL either resolves or redirects — search equity survives the move.

The archive is the real project

Ask any publisher who has migrated: the new CMS was the easy half. Years of articles in legacy markup dialects, embedded media with dead URLs, and metadata that only exists in a print-layout database — that is where migrations live or die. Budget for it, automate it, and start before the new CMS contract is signed.

Read how this worked in practice in our NZZ case study, or get an honest assessment of your migration scope.