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The SDL Tridion World community site is finally migrated and decomissioned

Bart Koopman (former member)

Some of you might have already noticed it, but when you try to go to the domain http://sdltridionworld.com you are redirected to the Tridion Developers group on the SDL Community site. Those redirects are the last part in the migration of the SDL Tridion World website, which started a long time ago.

In July 2010, when I had just moved from Professional Services to become a Community Development Consultant as part of the Product Management organization, my boss asked me to take content ownership of our developer/community site (named SDL Tridion World), and make sure it would get a technical owner who could administer the servers it was running on.

A few weeks later, we came to the conclusion that the current site needed to be replaced/rebuilt, in order to have a better way of maintaining it. I started gathering the requirements of the current site and looked at options on making it better. In October 2010 I tried to hand over these requirements to SDL's web development team, so they could start the project of building a new Tridion developer/community site. 

In March 2011 they finally had come up with a plan to replace our SDL Tridion powered website with a Telligent community platform. But those plans never really took off for a variety of reasons. In 2013 I helped setup a new development team for SDL to create a new SDL.com website, powerd by SDL Tridion, and once that was done, I looked into option of getting that team to help me build a replacement of SDL Tridion World. But it ended up with a lot of plans being frozen due to budget and focus changes. 

Finally in April 2014, we started discussing the migration of SDL Tridion World again, by then a new SDL Community site was released already, running on Telligents community and collaboration software platform, and that would be able to hosts at least parts of the content from our aging SDL Tridion World website (which was still running on Tridion 2009, and had no technical owner).

In January 2015 we started the content migration, with the help of humans, not tools (you know my thoughts around this) of course. But then what was left was about 100 extensions, and a lot of content owned by Customer Support and Product Management. Making the plans for moving that and getting it actualy migrated took longer than I expected, but in December 2016 we finally started to migrate the extensions to SDL's AppStore, the language and content industry’s first app store. We had already tried before to migrate some extension to the Telligent platform, but found it wasn't well suited for the job, and customizing it proved to create a too high total cost of ownership.

In January 2017, when I came back from a long holiday in a very cold Canada, I made my last and final wrong assumption, to the fact that we were almost there. While the work that needed to be done wasn't a lot anymore, getting everybody to agree on it and then getting it executed again took longer than I expected. But now the moment is finally there, all content is migrated and the redirects from the http://sdltridionworld.com domain are in place. The entire migration process only took seven years (that is half the time I have been working at SDL ;o), but the results are certainly something everybody can be proud of.

In case you are all in panic now, worrying if that content which you knew was there on SDL Tridion World is still there, let me quickly list where everything has moved to (keep in mind, for all articles, extensions and the most important pages, we have created redirect URLs, so hitting those old URLs will automatically redirect you to their new location).