Hi @rkristie and @jason.pike
First, thanks for your enthusiasm and willingness to migrate large sites to the SliceMachine approach!
Sorry if we haven't brought enough visibility on the progress of SliceMachine and specifically on the migration path. I've gathered updates internally and here is the status:
Production readiness: some important features are missing in the local SliceMachine builder (namely Content Relationship and Integration Fields). The SliceMachine team is currently working on this:
- making the Custom Type builder (not only Slice Builder) available locally, this will make Content Relationships available in the Builder for Shared Slices
- last step will be to make Integration Fields configuration available in the local builder
You should see important updates on the above in a month from now.
Migration path: the team is currently figuring out the implementation of a built-in migration tool that seamlessly takes care of the model and data migration. To achieve this they need to be able to fetch the Custom Types locally and transform the model of classic Slices into "Shared Slices". Once this is completed we'll be able to provide a clear migration guide. In the meantime, having a script to migrate the slices as @Fares proposed is not enough because it doesn't handle the data (content) migration.
Docs: @rkristie you're right that we've made the docs look like the SliceMachine path was the only option. We realised we missed a thing on making things clearer in our docs to help users choose the "Beta" path or the "Traditional" one (without SM). We've fixed this on the Next docs yesterday: Getting started with the Next.js & Prismic - Prismic
To conclude, we are steadily moving towards the SliceMachine approach as we've validated the interest from a large community of users. Be reassured that we plan to provide an official migration tooling and guide so that existing sites will be portable to SM.