Sector(s)
Project Team
Vardot delivered the engagement through a dedicated team comprising a full-time Drupal developer, a part-time QA engineer, and a project/engagement manager, with technical account management provided at the CEO/technical-advisor level. The team operated within Aviation Week's Scrum process alongside the client's product organization.
Aviation Week Network is a New York-based B2B publishing and event business serving the global aerospace, airline, defense, space, MRO, and business aviation industries. Acquired by Informa in 2016, it operates aviationweek.com alongside a portfolio of data services, market briefings, publications, and the Aviation Week Intelligence Network (AWIN).
The site was originally rebuilt and launched on Drupal by a previous vendor in December 2019. Aviation Week needed a partner to take over continuous maintenance and feature development of the platform, sustaining velocity while safeguarding stability for a demanding enterprise audience.
Vardot, a Drupal Diamond Certified Partner and enterprise digital experience agency, assumed responsibility for the platform's ongoing development, quality assurance, and maintenance under an annual continuous-delivery engagement.
About the project
Goals and requirements
Aviation Week needed to transition ongoing ownership of a live, high-traffic Drupal platform from a previous vendor to a partner who could sustain continuous delivery without disruption. The engagement was structured around three pillars: a dedicated development team working in the client's existing Scrum process and Jira tooling; an enterprise support and maintenance SLA covering monitoring, security, and incident response; and technical account management providing strategic Drupal guidance.
Because this was a platform takeover rather than a new build, an early priority was a full site audit to map the existing architecture, building blocks, features, and integrations, giving the incoming team the visibility needed to work safely on a codebase built by others.
Approach
Vardot embedded a dedicated team into Aviation Week's agile workflow, operating on the client's Jira board with daily standups, twice-weekly status syncs, sprint planning, and end-of-sprint reviews. Work flowed continuously from the backlog into shippable increments. In parallel, the platform was connected to Vardot's enterprise monitoring and support systems for availability, performance, security, and centralized logging, with a tiered SLA defining response times by severity.
Outcome
Vardot has sustained continuous development and maintenance of aviationweek.com as an ongoing engagement, keeping the platform current, secure, and evolving. A visible marker of that stewardship: the site has been maintained and upgraded across major Drupal versions, now running on Drupal 10 with Drupal Commerce, well beyond the original 2019 Drupal 8 build. The relationship, which began with a single site under an annual contract, was structured from the outset with the expectation of expanding to additional Aviation Week and Informa Drupal properties over time.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was already the foundation of aviationweek.com when Vardot's engagement began, and the platform continues to prove why it fits Aviation Week's needs. As a large-scale B2B publisher, Aviation Week runs a content operation spanning six market sectors, dozens of subtopics, multiple publications, podcasts, webinars, and gated intelligence products, all within a single platform. Drupal's content modeling, flexible taxonomy, and revision control handle this editorial complexity natively.
The platform also runs Drupal Commerce to sell subscriptions, data services, and publications directly, and integrates enterprise capabilities including Apache Solr search, single sign-on, and a range of third-party service integrations. Drupal's open-source foundation and mature ecosystem let Aviation Week maintain a sophisticated, integration-heavy platform without vendor lock-in, while its long-term-support and upgrade path enabled a clean progression from the original Drupal 8 build to the current Drupal 10 release.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The platform relies on Drupal Commerce to sell subscriptions, publications, and data products directly through the site. Apache Solr, integrated via Search API and Search API Solr, powers fast, faceted search across a very large content archive spanning six market sectors and multiple publications. The site also integrates single sign-on and social login, feed importers, and RESTful APIs to connect with Aviation Week's broader data and subscriber ecosystem.
