From 2020 to 2024, I guided my team and the university through rebuilding the GW Drupal platform from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9. Then over 400 sites were manually migrated, reviewed, cleaned up and relaunched.
The Problem
The Drupal community releases a new version every year and we were multiple generations behind. Additionally, our legacy theme and CMS experience no longer met the marketing needs of site owners across the university.
The Solution
Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 required rebuilding the entire enterprise platform. So we did. We reviewed analytics and our backlog, complied user feedback from over the years and researched current best practices accessibility requirements, and trends.
We rethought how every page content type would best serve our end users, optimize for SEO and mobile, and be flexible enough to tell the stories of our varied site owners.
This was an extreme test of agile development cycles for us. We were often ‘building the track while driving the train’. We launched pilot sites with MVP codebases and iterated our plans using their real-world feedback. And we were maintaining our legacy sites on a separate server the entire time.
By 2022, we were heavily focused on migrating legacy D7 sites one at a time into D9. Every site was manually reviewed, and most needed new content strategy and design to make the content accessible, in-brand and modernized for the new platform.
We also hosted extensive training for our content strategists and site owners, as well as leadership presentations and reviews.
The Result
In the end, we built a platform that is nimble enough to meet the needs of a huge cross-section of site owners. We also developed workflows and processes to upgrade the platform on an annual basis, which has been critical in accessing the most up-to-date feature sets. And we built an enormous amount of trust in our stakeholders across the university.