Sector(s)

Team Members

ndf

Project Team

The project was led by CodeLift founder Niels de Feyter, who managed the complete upgrade lifecycle from audit through deployment, including AI-assisted problem solving for complex upgrade blockers, visual regression test suite creation, and hosting migration.


 

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

config_uuid_deterministic - A Drupal module for deterministic UUID generation in configuration management, useful for multi-instance deployments.
The Antwerp Maritime Academy is a leading Belgian maritime educational institution with a complex multilingual website (Dutch, English, French). CodeLift upgraded the platform from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, migrated it to premium hosting with PHP 8.3, and established an "always up-to-date" SLA for ongoing maintenance.

About the project

The Antwerp Maritime Academy trains students for careers at sea and in the maritime industry. Their multilingual website supports research groups, training programs, and international students across Dutch, English, and French.

Goals and Requirements

- Upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 with zero downtime
- Preserve all 18 content types and 32 paragraph types
- Maintain trilingual content workflows for research pages and student portals
- Migrate to optimized hosting infrastructure with PHP 8.3
- Establish an ongoing "always up-to-date" SLA for continuous security and maintenance

Challenges:

- Complex multilingual platform with extensive content structures spanning research groups, job listings, and training programs
- Missing database updates and outdated module configurations that blocked standard Drupal upgrade paths
- Need to validate visual consistency across 3 languages for all critical pages

Approach:

- AI-assisted tooling was used to solve specific upgrade challenges that standard migration tools could not handle, including missing database updates and outdated module configurations
- A test suite with 58 scenarios was built to automatically validate all critical pages in three languages using screenshot comparisons
- The website was moved to CodeLift's optimized infrastructure with automated deployments and direct SSH access
- New deployment scripts were implemented with built-in safety measures: maintenance mode, database backups, cache clearing, and rollback capabilities

 

Outcomes:

- Zero minutes of downtime during migration
- 58 automated visual regression tests across 3 languages
- 18 content types and 32 paragraph types successfully migrated
- Platform running on Drupal 10.5 with PHP 8.3
- Ongoing maintenance covered by "always up-to-date" SLA, removing maintenance burden from the client's IT team

Why Drupal was chosen

The client was already running on Drupal and chose to modernize their platform rather than replatform. Upgrading preserved their existing content, workflows, and team expertise while gaining access to modern Drupal's improved security, performance, and extensibility.
Antwerp Maritime Academy

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
The Paragraphs module was essential for preserving the academy's 32 distinct paragraph types that power their flexible content layouts. Content Translation modules maintained the trilingual content workflows critical for serving Dutch, English, and French-speaking audiences. BackstopJS was used for automated visual regression testing to validate consistency across all languages before launch.