Contemporary&

C& had ambitions to bring their two separate WordPress sites together into a single, modern and cohesive online destination. This meant migrating 12,000 articles, across 4 different languages, without losing the editorial integrity of either publication. The new system needed to serve a global readership, support a bilingual editorial workflow, and make twelve years of content discoverable in a way the old architecture never could.

Two WordPress sites with different data structures, different taxonomies, different article types, language translations, and a decade of patches needed to come together cleanly into a single new system.

Using n8n, we built a migration workflow that took each article, cleaned the data, restructured it and uploaded it into Sanity. It took multiple runs to test and validate before we were confident every article had made the transition correctly. The block-based editorial layout gives the team the flexibility to craft pages around the content rather than the other way around.

The ambition was to create a powerful search and discovery tool using AI-suggested tags across the entire archive.The ambition was to create a powerful search and discovery tool using AI-suggested tags across the entire archive. Manually reclassifying thousands of articles was not an option.

As part of the migration flow, we used AI to read the text of each piece, recategorise existing tags and suggest new ones, working from a predefined taxonomy specific to each content type – events, articles and place profiles each had their own tag structure. It built the foundation that now powers search and discovery across the platform, and turned a near-impossible content problem into something the editorial team can continue to build on.

The new architecture brings both magazines under one roof while preserving their distinct identities. The editorial teams across the two magazines can now manage content, build pages and extend the platform without the constraints of the old system holding them back.