Sector(s)
The federation brings together a national network of local associations. Its website, with national, regional and local sections, is maintained by 400 contributors. It ran on Drupal 7. Parker+Parker spent three months reverse engineering it, then rebuilt every feature on Drupal 11. The editorial interface matches the old one screen by screen, so the existing user guides still apply.
About the project
Results
- 400 contributors moved to Drupal 11 without retraining.
- 3 months of reverse engineering before any development.
- 3 permission levels reproduced: national, regional and local.
- No Drupal 7 code reused: every feature was rebuilt.
- No content had to be re-entered: all pages, member files, groups, custom fields, forms and images were carried over identically, without regression.
The user guides written for Drupal 7 remain the reference documentation. The new site was built around them.
Goal
Move a federation website with national, regional and local sections from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11, while keeping every screen, label and button familiar to its contributors.
Challenge
- Retraining 400 contributors across the country was not an option.
- Several thousand content items had to be recovered.
- The group management module used on Drupal 7 was obsolete and missing from Drupal 11.
- Some members have no email address but still need to log in.
- Years of custom behavior had to be understood before anything could be rebuilt.
Solution
- Reverse engineering. For three months, the team analyzed the Drupal 7 site screen by screen and listed every feature, permission rule and expected behavior.
- Full rebuild. Content, menus, forms, calendars, newsletters, galleries and the file explorer run on a new Drupal 11 codebase.
- Group management, same behavior. The Drupal 7 group logic was rebuilt as a custom module, with the same national, regional and local permissions.
- Identical back office. Screen layout, field order, labels and button placement match the Drupal 7 interface, while staying on standard Drupal 11 administration.
- Login without email. Members without an email address log in with another identifier.
- Acceptance testing by webmasters. The network's webmasters tested each delivery and reported any gap with the Drupal 7 site before launch.
What editors do without developers
Contributors kept their routines from day one. They publish news, events and newsletters for their association or region with the same screens as before, and the same guides.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal 7 support ended in January 2025. The federation needed a maintained platform without disrupting its network of contributors. Staying on Drupal kept the concepts contributors already knew: content types, menus, roles and permissions. Drupal 11 provides what is needed to reproduce a complex permission model across three levels, national, regional and local. Its administration interface can be configured field by field to match an existing layout. As open source software with a published release schedule, Drupal also gives the federation a long-term maintenance path.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
No contributed module is central to this project. Group management was rebuilt as a custom module reproducing the Drupal 7 behavior, with national, regional and local permissions.
