Content Migration Automation

Summary: a practical automation project for moving 1500+ WordPress articles through a controlled, script-driven workflow.

Why I built it

The migration volume made manual work risky. Repeating the same browser steps hundreds of times creates inconsistent output, missed records, and poor visibility into failures.

What it does

The workflow extracts article data, normalizes content fields, drives browser actions where needed with Puppeteer, logs progress, and keeps enough state to resume after failure.

Migration Pipeline

 [WordPress Source] ──➔ [HTML Parser] ──➔ [Sanitizer / Transformer]
                                                  │
                                            (Resumable Log)
                                                  │
                                                  ▼
 [WordPress Target] ◄── [Puppeteer Browser] ◄── [Publish Queue]

Tech stack

Node.js for scripting, Puppeteer for browser automation, WordPress as the content source/target environment, and structured logs for progress tracking.

Key engineering decisions

I separated extraction, transformation, and publishing. That made it easier to inspect intermediate output and avoid coupling content cleanup to browser timing issues.

Problems I ran into

Browser automation depends on selectors, network timing, authentication state, and occasional inconsistent page behavior. The script needed retries and useful logs more than it needed raw speed.

Engineering Notes & Lessons Learned

• Resumable State Operations: Network failures and browser timeouts are guaranteed over long runs. Storing crawl progress in a local state manifest allows the script to recover instantly without duplicating calls or skipping items.
• Decoupled Transformation Pipelines: Separating content cleanup (regex stripping, HTML normalisation) from browser navigation allows intermediate artifacts to be inspected and tested offline before pushing changes to the destination site.

Validation Notes

• High-Volume Execution: Migrated 1,500+ rich-text articles under a single automated Puppeteer script run.
• Fault-Tolerant Resumability: Verified resumable log state behavior by recovering crawl progress after transient network timeouts without duplicating completed content stages.
• Pipeline Automation: Replaced manual migration estimation of several months with a controlled, repeatable import script executed within a single month.

What I would improve next

I would add stronger preflight validation, richer progress reports, and a dry-run mode that compares source and target records before publishing.

Links

Project-specific repository and demo links are not public yet.