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Case Study: Migrating Legacy BLOX CMS Websites to WordPress for Carpenter Media Group

Background

Carpenter Media Group, a leading acquirer of local newspapers across the United States, faced a significant technical challenge after purchasing dozens of publications. Dozens of these newspapers operated websites built on BLOX CMS (formerly TownNews), a platform that exports content and media in ZIP archives using the News Industry Text Format (NITF)—an XML-based standard designed specifically for organizing news content.

The News Industry Text Format (NITF) was developed in the late 1990s by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). NITF was designed to standardize the structure of news content and metadata for syndication, archiving, and cross-platform distribution. While once widely adopted, NITF has seen declining usage in favor of more modern formats like JSON and web-native APIs. Still, it remains common in legacy systems and continues to be used by platforms like BLOX CMS, presenting unique challenges when migrating to content management systems like WordPress, which are not natively compatible with NITF’s complex structure. Unfortunately, no comprehensive, off-the-shelf solution had been created for migrating NITF content to WordPress.

Challenges

  • Each exported ZIP file could contain tens or hundreds of thousands of articles and media files in XML format.
  • NITF XML structures include granular metadata (e.g., publish dates, authors, keywords), which needed to be preserved in the WordPress environment.
  • Articles had to be formatted into Gutenberg-compatible posts, despite the source format’s complexity.
  • Media needed to be uploaded, timestamped, and associated with correct content entries.
  • The solution had to support WordPress VIP’s secure, enterprise-grade infrastructure as well as other hosting environments.

Partnering with Inverse Paradox

WordPress VIP introduced Carpenter Media Group to Inverse Paradox, a digital agency with deep expertise in enterprise WordPress development. As the company was considering partners for this project, they vetted several options and their team hit it off immediately with Inverse Paradox. Kevin Cooper, Senior Vice President & COO shares, “They quickly understood what our needs work and efficiently built out a solution that would work for us and within the bounds of our long partnership with WordPress VIP. The combination of IP and WPVIP has been a rock solid one for us.”

Inverse Paradox was tasked with architecting and delivering a solution to facilitate the bulk migration of NITF-formatted content into WordPress, including support for multisite environments and strict enterprise-grade standards. This required the successful migration of a preliminary 3 websites’ content within 90-days.

Technical Discovery

Initial research led the development team to exploring the following open-source tools:

  • The WordPress Publishing Importer plugin on GitHub by ​​German agency, Netz Strategen, which provided early insight into working with XML formats. This was useful as a starting point, but it’s not actively maintained and lacks support for media handling and complex metadata.
  • David Megginso’s NITF-to-HTML conversion modules, a set of Python scripts/modules designed to convert NITF XML into HTML. This focuses primarily on content transformation, not direct WordPress integration; however this was instrumental in understanding how to parse and render NITF content as usable HTML.

Although these were great sources to better understand NITF data, the BLOX CMS had some unique nuances and slight variation which differed from whatever libraries they were working with. Having these references as well as a thorough review of the exported data, Inverse Paradox’s Ben Martin led the development of a custom WordPress plugin purpose-built for NITF migration both for Carpenter Media Group but also any other newspaper requiring a similar migration.

Solution Development

The first objective was to ensure the solution would be flexible to be compatible with most hosting platforms including WordPress VIP. The plugin provides the options of either manually uploading the ZIPs to a specific uploads directory on the server or to retrieve the ZIPs from an alternative server.

The plugin then decompresses all of the ZIPs on the server temporarily and runs an index of each file’s content. Following the assets being indexed, the plugin begins by walking through all of the files related to article content, creating the initial post objects from these files. While each article is processed, the article content will be scanned for any associated media files. If detected, the related media file(s) will then be pulled into the media library. These media IDs will then be added to the post’s meta. Once all articles and their associated media have been processed, a new routine begins to handle any media that was not associated with an article. Those are then added to the media library. Unfortunately, due to the sophisticated nature of Gutenberg, the articles are imported into a Gutenberg “Classic” block as HTML.

Some of the features include:

  • Support for WordPress multisite
  • Ability to import keywords as tags
  • Creating & assigning content categories
  • Creating data available for custom media galleries
  • Associating one or multiple authors
  • Ability to generate 301 redirects for legacy URL structures.
  • Creating custom meta fields for maintaining other data points which can then be leveraged in the website’s theme

For developers, the plugin includes:

  • Cleansing of invalid or outdated markup (e.g., removal of Adobe Flash embeds).
  • Escaped tag correction and cleanup of deprecated content formats.
  • Error logging for troubleshooting malformed XML or unexpected edge cases.
  • Automatic cleanup of temporary file storage and database tables post-import with a single button-click.
  • Automation to recheck and requeue any failed import actions.

Validation & Training

As part of the project scope, Inverse Paradox managed the migration of 3 websites in order to debug the plugin including accounting for any unique edge-cases and validating the migration processes. Following proving the migration, training was provided so that Carpenter Media could manage their own migrations internally with minimum development support. This allowed for them to assign multiple individuals to run imports so that they could quickly perform migrations and build out their new WordPress websites.

Known Limitations

File Uploads

There are a few known limitations related to file uploads and data handling which can vary by hosting provider. For example, while the official upload limit on WordPress VIP is 2GB, Inverse Paradox was able to extend this to 5GB per upload, though it may fall outside their terms of service. Larger exports, such as a 100GB dataset from 2024 for Carpenter Media Group, has to be split into 5GB ZIPs for upload. Although this is a small challenge, it can still be processed efficiently in a single run once uploaded.

Image Sizes

Many content management systems do not restrict file sizes or perform any server side processing to resize images. The result is that legacy articles might have images which are very large. This was the case with Carpenter Media Group, “We’re finding around mid-2010s some of the sites seem to have enormous amounts of images (4,500 in a single month is the biggest I’ve seen yet) and some of the images are equally enormous (20MB to 40MB jpegs). We’ve found running all the images through a Photoshop script to resize them down to 1200 pixels or less speeds up the processing time.” So in some cases, it might be beneficial to pre-process all of the media through Photoshop and recompress the exported images before uploading the ZIP of NITF data and images to the server to further speed up the process.

Blox CMS vs. NITF Data

Although the plugin was developed for NITF data, as previously mentioned, there are some unique attributes to how the data is exported from the Blox CMS which are factored into the plugin. NITF Data exports from other sources might require further advancement of the plugin to account for the source.

Successful Migrations

“The Inverse Paradox team was a fantastic partner to us. Great communication and they delivered their work on the timeline that we agreed upon at the outset. We had migrated NITF archives in the past both using off-the-shelf import solutions and customized scripts to help us clean things up. All of those options were slow and, quite frankly, pretty messy. With that experience and given the number sites and the voluminous archives some of those sites had, we knew we needed help in architecting a solid, scalable solution. Inverse Paradox delivered that solution. “ -Kevin Cooper, Senior Vice President & COO

A few of the websites migrated by the Inverse Paradox team include:

Since implementation, Carpenter Media Group has successfully migrated more than 30 sites in less than 4 months independent of any agency support. A few examples of websites successfully migrated include the Redmond Spokesman, The Meridian Star, and The News Courier.

Although it can be difficult to fully benchmark the speed of the process due to the variability in the number of articles, media assets and their sizes, the import process proved to be remarkably efficient, even when handling large volumes of data. For example, importing a 3GB archive containing 435 articles and 2,000 media assets took approximately 20 minutes on WordPress VIP. Carpenter Media was able to queue up multiple ZIP files at a time, allowing the process to run in the background while they continued to focus on other tasks. According to Kevin Cooper, “We were able to import 10 to 20 years of archives in a matter of a few days in some cases. That’s light years faster than we had been able to work those using our past methods. At this point, we’ve imported the archives of just under three dozen news sites. That’s terabytes of data, tens of millions of articles and media files.”

Do you need BLOX CMS or NITF data migration to WordPress?

Inverse Paradox has partnered with Carpenter Media Group to extend this migration solution to other newspaper publishers seeking to transition their BLOX CMS or NITF-based content to WordPress. While the plugin is not currently available for public distribution, licensing options and professional migration services are available upon request. For more information, contact Inverse Paradox.

About Inverse Paradox

As a WordPress VIP partner, Inverse Paradox is a Philadelphia-based digital agency specializing in custom WordPress and eCommerce solutions for businesses of all sizes. Inverse Paradox blends strategic thinking with expert design and development to deliver tailored digital experiences that drive results. With a focus on collaboration, transparency, and long-term partnerships, the agency helps their clients grow and thrive online.

About Carpenter Media

Carpenter Media Group is a leading community-focused media organization dedicated to uplifting local journalism, empowering businesses, and fostering career growth across a multitude of traditional print newspapers, digital news sites and affiliated magazines in more than 240 communities  in the U.S. and Canada.

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NITF Importer Plugin main options and import

Import Processing


Offsite File Downloader

Sample article layout with heading, meta, image, and content

Sample article with headline, date/time, author, featured image, image caption, & article