WFFM Conversion Tool: the new automated solution to convert Sitecore Web Forms For Marketers items and data to Sitecore Forms

Last year the Sitecore Web Forms For Marketers (WFFM) module was officially deprecated with the release of Sitecore XP 9.1. Sitecore Forms has become the only supported option for content authors to build marketing forms in Sitecore. While this was not a disruptive news for any new green field website project, this announcement had a relatively big impact on existing Sitecore web applications that used the Sitecore WFFM module, and wanted to upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore. The only upgrade option was to manually recreate the marketing forms using Sitecore Forms, spending a good amount of time and leaving the saved WFFM forms data behind.

Well…Until now!

A New Tool is Born

I am very excited to announce the introduction of a new tool, the WFFM Conversion Tool, an open source console application that provides an automated solution to convert and migrate Sitecore WFFM forms items and their data to Sitecore Forms.

This tool aims to drastically reduce the time to convert and migrate WFFM forms items to Sitecore Forms items while keeping and migrating all saved forms data. The tool supports the migration of data from both a SQL WFFM database source and from a MongoDB analytics database source.

How Does The Tool Work?

The WFFM Conversion Tool has been designed to support the migration of sitecore items from any previous version of Sitecore to Sitecore 9.1+. The tool uses mapping configuration files in JSON format, called Metadata Template files, to control the conversion process of source entities (items, fields, …). Because the tool directly interacts with the Sitecore databases, it doesn’t require the source and destination Sitecore instances to run in IIS while the conversion process occurs.

The tool processes all items and their fields for each WFFM form in the source Sitecore instance and converts and migrates them following the conversion mapping rules defined in the Metadata Template files. Not all fields can be converted and migrated, like for example the form verification actions, defined in the Check Actions form field.

Fields that are not mapped will not be converted and migrated. The tool helps to understand the eventual gaps in the conversion process, generating a conversion analysis report that lists the items and the fields that cannot be converted. This report can be used to determine what needs to be manually tweaked after the conversion process is concluded.

Can The Tool Convert Custom Items?

Yes! But you will need to do a little bit of configuration and development work to help the tool to understand how to map your custom items. The tool documentation explains how to create new Metadata Template files to map custom form field types or how to create a custom field converter to convert a custom WFFM save action.

Yes, I Want it! Where Can I Get it?

The latest release of the WFFM Conversion Tool can be directly downloaded from the GitHub project releases page. The tool documentation can be found at the readme file at the root of the project.

Need Help?

If you have any questions, feel free to start a conversation in Sitecore Slack in the channel #wffm-forms. You can also reach out to me directly in Sitecore slack or on Twitter.

Of course feel free to open new issues in GitHub to report bugs or to suggest a new feature for the tool.

Thank you for reading!