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University Communications and Marketing 
Web Platforms and Documentation

Pre-Conversion Preparation

In most cases, these steps will be taken care of by UComm, but are provided here for reference.

Site Preparation

An automated migration process and selection of tools is currently available for any site running the college-parent v2.4+ theme. These migration tools aid in the majority of page and post conversions for either automatic conversion to a Gutenberg-compatible format or assisted manual conversion.

To begin, make sure that your current site is running at least v2.4+. If not, please follow prior upgrade procedures or contact UComm for assistance.

Two migration specific plugins are needed to begin the process: the NC State Experimental Tools plugin, and the Content Converter Add-On plugin. The Content Converter Add-On plugin is available and installed via Cthulhu. The NC State Experimental Tools plugin is not for widespread use and therefore must be pulled and built directly from GitHub (or contact UComm for assistance). Note: The NC State Experimental Tools plugin is also not recommended for long term use on servers. Once the bulk of the migration procedure is complete, the plugin should be removed from the server until needed again.

As with all large-scale system changes, it it highly recommended that all migration procedures occur on production clones, never directly in production.

Migration Steps, Pre-Gutenberg

While running college-parent, navigate to NC State Experimental Tools in the sidebar of the Dashboard and Select ‘College Parent Migrations’.  Note: this option will only show up if you have college-parent 2.4+ or a child theme of college-parent 2.4+ installed and active.

You should see two ajax-based Page migrations. One converts all ACF content to shortcode format and places it into post_content of each page/post. The other generates header metadata for the theme based on ACF header data. These two migrations should be run in order.

You will also see two ajax-based Post migrations. One converts all old NC State News Plugin metadata into an NC State Stories compatible format. The other removes inline styling that conflicts with our theme styles.

You will also see a prompt to save the current shortcode regex. This will allow the Shortcode Finder utility to search for instances of shortcodes found on the current site, regardless of whether they are supported in the upgraded site. As most shortcodes are now blocks, this will aid in finding and upgrading shortcodes post-upgrade.

Upgraded Theme and Plugin Installation

The Gutenberg compatible NC State Theme and all supporting plugins are distributed through production channels in Cthulhu. Once the site has been prepared and migrated, install and activate the latest version of the NC State Theme, as well as latest versions of any supporting plugins depending on your site’s setup. For example, if your site is also serving as a news site, you’ll likely need NC State Stories as well.

At this point, the Content Converter Add-on should also be installed and activated. On each page/post, enter into edit mode and select ‘Convert to Blocks’ to perform the conversion from classic to Gutenberg editor.