From GSB 7 to GSB 11 – A Practical Migration Journey

When a government agency needs to move hundreds of pages from the CoreMedia-based Government Site Builder 7 to GSB 11 — now built on TYPO3  — the first questions aren't technical. They're editorial: Does the new system's default design actually fit? Which content is worth migrating at all? Where does the system live, and who owns it?

This talk walks through exactly that project, from those early scoping decisions to production go-live.

Decisions first. We'll cover why getting alignment on design, content scope, and hosting upfront saved significant rework later — and why skipping these conversations is the most common reason migrations stall.

Then the technical core. Moving from a proprietary Java-based CMS to TYPO3 means there's no shared API — XML export is the only way out. We'll dig into extracting legacy content from CoreMedia's XML format and importing it into TYPO3 using CommandController and the DataHandler API: mapping old data structures to new ones, handling the inevitable edge cases, and keeping the process repeatable and auditable across multiple import runs.

And the tooling no one talks about. Raw data transfer was only part of the work. To make the migration manageable for a non-technical content team, we built what didn't exist out of the box: a migration status dashboard, per-page comment fields for editorial feedback, and a CSV export giving editors a live overview of every page's state. This is the part most teams skip — and the part that made the difference between a chaotic handover and one the editors actually owned.

Finally, the retrospective. What the finished migration looks like in production, what worked, and what we'd do differently next time.

You'll leave with a realistic picture of what a repeatable, auditable TYPO3 migration looks like end-to-end — relevant to anyone still running GSB 7 or facing a similar leap from a proprietary CMS to the TYPO3 ecosystem.