Publishers stuck on legacy CMS platforms face a difficult choice: stay with systems that limit growth or undertake the daunting process of migrating years of content to a modern platform. The good news is that migration no longer requires months of developer time or risky manual transfers. Our scraping and mapping process can move your entire archive from Blox CMS, Drupal, or virtually any publisher-focused system into WordPress—cleanly and completely.
Key Takeaways
- Any CMS can be migrated to WordPress using content scraping and intelligent mapping, regardless of export limitations.
- Blox CMS from TownNews, Drupal, and other publisher platforms often lack clean export tools, making traditional migration approaches impractical.
- Scraping bots pull all published content directly from your live site, bypassing database access requirements entirely.
- Content mapping preserves your site structure, categories, authors, images, and metadata during import.
- WordPress with Leaky Paywall gives publishers modern subscription tools, flexible themes, and an ecosystem of plugins unavailable on legacy platforms.
- Full migrations typically complete faster than rebuilding export pipelines from proprietary systems.
The Legacy CMS Problem
Many local news publishers launched on platforms that made sense a decade ago. Blox CMS from TownNews serves hundreds of newspapers but locks publishers into a closed ecosystem with limited customization. Drupal offered flexibility but requires specialized developers and has grown increasingly complex. Other publisher-focused systems like Jeebly, Jeedio, or custom-built platforms create similar constraints.
These systems share common problems: aging interfaces, expensive maintenance, limited integrations with modern subscription and newsletter tools, and vendor lock-in that makes leaving feel impossible. When publishers ask about exporting their content, they often discover that clean exports don’t exist or require expensive custom development.
How Our Migration Process Works
We bypass traditional export limitations entirely. Instead of requesting database access or wrestling with proprietary export formats, our scraping bots crawl your published site and capture everything readers can see: articles, images, author information, categories, tags, publication dates, and metadata.
This approach works regardless of your current CMS. If your content displays on the web, we can capture it. The method is particularly valuable for platforms like Blox CMS that don’t provide straightforward export tools or Drupal installations where the database structure has been heavily customized over years of modifications.
After scraping, we map your content to WordPress structures. Categories align with WordPress categories. Authors become WordPress users. Images transfer to the media library with proper associations. Custom fields and metadata carry over where WordPress equivalents exist. The result is a complete WordPress site that preserves your archive and maintains your URL structures for SEO continuity.
Why WordPress for Publishers
WordPress powers a significant portion of the web for good reason. Publishers gain access to modern subscription tools like Leaky Paywall, flexible theme options, and thousands of plugins for newsletters, SEO, advertising, and reader engagement. Developer availability is high and costs are reasonable compared to specialists for proprietary systems.
The platform handles everything from small community news sites to major publications. Combined with managed hosting like PaywallProject, publishers get enterprise-grade infrastructure without enterprise complexity or cost.
Migration to WordPress also future-proofs your operation. When you want to add a new newsletter integration, change payment processors, or redesign your site, you have options. Legacy platforms often mean waiting for vendor updates that may never come.
What Gets Migrated
A complete migration includes all articles and their full text, images with proper sizing and associations, author profiles, category and tag structures, publication dates and timestamps, and URL mappings for redirect configuration. We work with you to handle edge cases like photo galleries, embedded media, and custom content types that need special attention.
After import, we verify content integrity and help configure redirects so existing links and search rankings transfer to your new site.
Getting Started
The first step is a site assessment where we review your current CMS and content volume to scope the migration. We then run a test batch, migrating a subset of content to verify the process captures everything correctly. Once approved, we complete the full migration in stages, with review checkpoints along the way.
Most migrations complete within a few weeks depending on archive size and complexity. Publishers typically launch their new WordPress site while keeping the old system available briefly for verification, then redirect traffic once everything is confirmed.
Contact us to discuss your migration from Blox CMS, Drupal, or whatever platform currently holds your content hostage.
