Upgrading customized Kentico site from Web Forms to new Kentico

You might want to look at some other posts about this. The main thing to think about is the difference in time/effort to attempt a migration vs. doing a rebuild. There is no upgrade path from Portal Engine to MVC so it will be manual work and no tool will 100% convert a Portal Engine site over to a MVC site.

Another thing to consider is how structured is your content? If you have a lot of structured content (Page types) then you can look into importing that data into your new site.

If you have a lot of custom code, you might want to determine what that custom code is for then determine if that is something you need moving forward or not. Why bring over old code if it's not used?

There are about 100 other considerations, but short story is there is no easy way.

Thanks Brenden. We don't expect any tool to do all the work but a concern we have is that we have a lot of widgets, so we want to know if we can import those. How would we port those widgets over to version 13?

The is no import/port/convert of those Portal Engine widgets. What I'd do is take an inventory of those widgets and determine what they are doing and how you might replicate that same functionality in v13. Then continue to move forward and create a mapping of sorts to see what will need to be custom and what can be OOTB.

Hi Branden - what about importing the Kentico markup into the pages, not the widget control? Would it stay intact and then continue to function? For instance if this is on a page, and the widget were rebuilt to hold those fields would the markup still work?

Code
<object codetype="CMSInlineControl" style="display: none" type="widget">
<param name="heropanelforegroundtheme" value="False" />
<param name="heropanelinverted" value="False" />
<param name="visible" value="True" />
<param name="hideonsubpages" value="False" />
<param name="heropanelheaderwhite" value="False" />
<param name="name" value="HeroPanel_widget" />
<param name="width" value="" />
<param name="height" value="" />

This code will not work with page builder widgets. What I'd suggest is to take a base KX13 site and see how widgets are built and stored in the database, then look into a way to migrate the values of the current widgets you have into the page builder widgets.

Or look for another CMS since it seems we can't import the data. We've been working with Kentico since v4 in 2010 and always been able to upgrade. This seems like a dead end.

Another CMS is always a possibility. However, moving away to another platform still doesn't solve the problem of importing widgets and their content. Your need is to convert ASP.NET forms user controls, form controls, pages, etc. to MVC Razor views and components. This is a technology shift from ASP.NET Forms to MVC/Core. A technology shift that was forced on the industry by Microsoft, not Kentico.

You can still import data, that is still there. What you cannot import is widgets into pages, this has never existed. If you do some research, you may be able to create a few tools once you figure out how Page Builder widgets work and you may be able to map that data from one page to another. I can guarantee you there is nothing written that will do this that is publically shared because every site is so unique that there's no possible way you'd be able to capture every scenario out there.