A secure and seamless Drupal 6.x to Drupal 7.x migration for Gainesville, Florida based online education course provider!

The brief

The client provides continuing education courses in civil, electrical geotechnical, mechanical, and structural engineering. Their goal is to provide quality continuing education courses at a great price. The client has approached us to migrate their outdated Drupal ecommerce site from Drupal 6.x version to Drupal 7.x.

Migrating a website from one platform to another can be a stressful and uncertain time if it is not carefully planned and well-executed. A good roadmap is necessary for upgrading the latest version within the CMS (Content Management System), for a smooth transition and minimal downtime. The goal was to deliver just the minimum viable project to meet scope/quality, concrete deliverables, deadline, and budget.

Why migrate?

There can be compelling reasons to upgrade a site, including adding functionality, improving performance and security. Additionally, it provides the opportunity to review and refine content, and improve UI/UX design for better user experience.

In this case study, project required a site migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 for which there was no automated migration path. The goal was to deliver just the minimum viable project to meet scope/quality, concrete deliverables, deadline, and budget.

The objective setting and approach

As usual, when we collaborate with a client for a migration project, we begin by establishing objectives and defining tasks so that everyone is on the same page and resources can be allocated appropriately. The typical migration project consists of planning, preparing the site for migration, upgrading, and testing. With the Drupal CMS, there will be platform-specific methodologies that need to be followed to ensure a trouble-free migration. Data handling in particular needs expert-level attention.

In this instance, the minimum viable project required:

• Migrated website from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7
  • All content and custom Content Types.
  • All files, including the dynamic generated certificate.
  • All Users and Roles.
  • All Taxonomy terms.
  • All Views, including Views supporting per-page dynamic content based on keywords.
  • All custom Webforms.
• Recreated and improved Views as per required.
• Implemented complex role-based access control.
• Customized Quiz module for end users to see quiz results.
• Implemented a fully responsive theme based on existing design.
• Expanded content manager tools to support:
  • Link checking
  • Maintain all SEO meta information like title, description, and headings
• Upgrade old ecommerce module to give support in Drupal 7.
• Implement Drupal Commerce and integrate Quiz/Result module with Drupal Commerce.
• Upgrade PHP version from 5.x to 7.x.