The experts at the German Council on Foreign Relations advise decision-makers in politics, business and civil society on foreign and security policy issues. Over 15,000 publications and 9,000 users were migrated from Drupal 7, which we had been supporting since 2014, to a completely redesigned Drupal 8 (Drupal 9-ready) in 2019.
The multidomain setup serves both the company's website, which focuses on research areas/expertise, and the independent German-language publication Internationale Politik. One of the special features of the implementation was the further development of the new layout builder in order to make it possible to editorially control a wide range of playout options for prefabricated content modules with context-dependent filtering.
Spotlight: Migration of content
One of the aims was to optimise the extensive input masks and thus increase user satisfaction among editors. The keywording from two taxonomies with around 500 terms had to be partially transferred to two other taxonomies. A number of workarounds were to be eliminated and the good indexing in the search engines was not to be damaged. In addition, there were new requirements for the networking of content and added value for members.
The core of a successful migration is hard work: we analyse the structure of the data records for each content type, each taxonomy and the user profiles, recording all fields along with the data type and limitations. We then discuss the optimisation potential with the customer.
Hard work: During a migration, every field in every entity is scrutinised.
In the next step, we form the new structure of the data records and add the information required for the migration scripts. If, as in this case, content is to be split into several new content types, we identify characteristics for automation.
This inevitably results in in-depth knowledge of the content inventory. These insights are helpful in the discussion of design drafts in order to recognise implementation hurdles at an early stage and develop alternatives.
In 2020, we won a Splash Award with this project for DGAP.
