As the increase in web access via mobile devices made a responsive web design imperative, the information and communication platform "waldwissen.net" was faced with a Herculean task: it had to include around 3,000 scientific articles and half a million data sets consisting of ratings, comments and user data including favorites lists, from an outdated content management system into a state-of-the-art TYPO3 application. zdrei.com developed the new platform and designed the data migration in an automated process.

Beyond the development of a modern and responsive design the website of the information and communication platform waldwissen.net was supposed to increase user-friendliness and to facilitate editorial work.

In addition to the accessibility via tablets and smartphones, visitors are offered increased research convenience through differentiated search and filter functions, in order to find the content and articles they are looking for much easier and faster.

In order to enable the editors to concentrate on their core competence of presenting scientific content in the process of creating articles, the technical hurdles in the placement of texts and images should be kept as low as possible.

The focus of the assignement was the question of how the already extremely comprehensive content of the existing website can be transferred from the outdated third-party system to the new TYPO3 application. An analysis specified this task: The volume of the existing content comprised approx. 3,000 scientific articles with a total of approx. 500,000 data records such as user data, ratings, lists of favorites, comments and other HTML pages that were to be migrated to the new application with the least possible manual effort.

During the development of the migration concept it became apparent that the problem lies in the details when extracting the data: For example, data sets such as page content and user data were in different databases. Other content was not available in databases at all, but had to be parsed from the HTML pages.

After the complete data collection, another major challenge was to make the individual articles findable using the new, clearly differentiated filter and search functions. Special algorithms were developed for this purpose, which enabled automated allocations to the individual categories.

Another important aspect of the relaunch was the modernization of the website look, in which, not as in the previous application, images are used in a larger format. The automatic transfer and assignment of images was possible in itself - it turned out, however, that some images could not be scaled sensibly to the required image width due to the existing image quality. The images in question had to be manually exchanged with versions of a different image size, or completely replaced.

The Enterprise CMS TYPO3 already offers ideal technical prerequisites for search engine optimization, which have been extensively exhausted. One potential SEO loss was that the new website with its numerous subpages received a completely new URL structure. The automated setting of "redirects" made it possible to ensure that the migrated content was forwarded from the old URL and thus can still be accessed despite the changed URL.

The information and communication platform waldwissen.net is a joint production of the four research institutions, the Forestry Test and Research Institute of Baden-Württemberg (FVA), the Bavarian State Institute for Forests and Forestry (LWF), the Federal Research and Training Center for Forests, Natural Hazards and Landscape (BFW) and Federal Research Institute for Forests, Snow and Landscape (WSL). In cooperation with partner institutes, this research community provides quality-assured specialist information on forests, people and forestry.
The basic idea is to network experts with different specializations in this field and to become the central contact point for forestry practitioners who do research and others who are interested in forest topics.

Developing a result that is even approximately comparable in terms of quality and process efficiency within the framework of a waterfall model would have been simply unthinkable. We are therefore pleased to see how far our customer waldwissen.net has embarked on an iterative approach and the exciting agile process. In addition, it has become clear how important firstly competent and secondly committed project management is for success: short distances, quick feedback, well-founded decisions - in short: we are enthusiastic and look forward to further cooperation!