Why we moved TransferForge from a WordPress plugin to a SaaS platform — and what TFIS and live Breakdance support mean for your migrations.

TransferForge is now a standalone web application on app.transferforge.com. You connect source and target WordPress sites from one dashboard, pull builder data, convert through our neutral TFIS (TransferForge Intermediate Schema) pipeline, and push to Oxygen 6 or Breakdance — with verified writes and per-page status.

Why leave the all-in-WordPress plugin model?

Builder storage formats differ wildly: PHP serialization, nested JSON, UUID trees, escaped tree_json_string blobs. Shipping all of that as import logic inside PHP on every customer server meant fighting serialization edge cases and slow, brittle testing. The conversion engine is now TypeScript on a SvelteKit API (Vercel), with a fast automated test suite — so fixes ship without you updating conversion code in PHP.

Migrations are multi-step workflows (connect, pull, convert, verify, push, cleanup). That fits a dedicated app far better than a wp-admin screen bolted onto a blog CMS.

What stayed the same

We still touch real builder data. A small TransferForge Bridge plugin on source and target sites exposes storage the REST API alone does not cover (e.g., Oxygen shortcodes/meta, Breakdance post meta). You authenticate with WordPress application passwords over HTTPS — no FTP or raw database credentials in the app.

What's live today

Oxygen Classic → Oxygen 6 and Oxygen Classic → Breakdance via TFIS
Stripe billing (Starter / Pro / Agency) inside the dashboard
Read-back verification after writes, resumable jobs, Zod-validated pipelines

What's next

Bricks as a target, deeper global styles and ACSS handling, and broader element support are on the public roadmap. TFIS means we add a builder by writing a parser or renderer — not an N×N matrix of one-off converters.

Thank you for sticking with us while we laid this foundation. If you're mid-migration, create a free account and run your first pulls against staging — we'd love your feedback.

— Dillon & The TransferForge Team