Export DokuWiki to Confluence

[Jaquez Jeison]

Until now, my team has been working with documentation using DokuWiki. As we are exploring a transition to Confluence, I would like to know: Is it possible to easily export content from DokuWiki to Confluence? If not, what would you suggest as the best approach for this migration?

[Kristian Klima · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jaquez Jeison and welcome to the Community.

Disclaimer: I'm a veteran of many a migration to Confluence.

There doesn't seem to be a direct migration tool* so you have three options:

• if DokuWiki can export content as XML, you can write a conversion tool that turns your DokuWiki XML in a Confluence XML. Back at CA Technologies, we migrated thousands of doc sets from AIT's XML to Confluence using this method.
  Important: It made sense for us to develop our own tooling because of the sheer volume of content we had to migrate.
• If DokuWIki can export into a *.doc file, you can give it a try. But from my experience, the results are subpar because of the word export quality and consistency, and you're likely to spend way too much time beautifying the docs (basically, making them usable).
• Manual copy-paste from your documentation site (rendered from DokuWiki). This worked for use when we migrated about 600 pages from sites originating in Paligo, MadCap Flare, and Zendesk.
  • Confluence Cloud is really good in converting HTML content into Confluence formats - in all cases, it required minimum amount of tweaks and style (macro) applications.
  • Sanity check was really quick - you are physically copy-pasting content page by page without risking omissions by automated scripts.
  • You will have to update the links, of course, as links from copy-pasted content will point to the original resource.
  • Estimate: I had an intern migrating 400 pages from a MadCap rendered site working part time, no previous experience with Confluence. He was done in 6 weeks, then spent 2 weeks fixing links, sanity checking and adjusting formatting here and there.

*I found a scrip in a github repo on the internets but it's 9 years old and probably not for Cloud. 

[Cyrille Martin · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jaquez Jeison 

There is no "one click" importer for that unfortunately. Even if this importer could be available the big question would be : Did you make some custom implementation on your Dokuwiki ?

The best approach to migrate from any legacy wiki to Confluence Cloud is to "clean up the garden", select which pages are really relevant and need to be put on Confluence. So this means to talk with the content leader/manager, get some statistics on the viewed pages and living content to only grap and copy/paste the relevant information.

You can still keep Dokuwiki accessible to anyone in read mode once this extraction has been done. And keep an eye on it to see if more content is consulted on it.

The migration is a huge project but also a juge opportunity to redefined the structure of content, the rules of usage, the page templates, and the rights.

Regards,