Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
About the project
The Midwest Archaeological Conference (MAC) is a professional organization affiliated with the University of Iowa, dedicated to advancing archaeological research and scholarship across the American Midwest. For over six decades, MAC has connected archaeologists, researchers, students, and enthusiasts who share a passion for uncovering and preserving the region's rich cultural heritage.
MAC's website serves as a digital hub for the scholarly community -- managing memberships, facilitating conference registrations, and providing access to scholarly resources. The platform was running on Drupal 8 with Ubercart, an aging e-commerce system that required modernization before reaching end-of-life.
Goals and Requirements:
The migration needed to preserve the organization's complex digital infrastructure while modernizing the underlying technology. Key requirements included migrating the Ubercart e-commerce system to Drupal Commerce, maintaining a sophisticated role-based membership system, preserving conference registration workflows with tiered pricing, and ensuring zero data loss across all historical records.
E-Commerce Migration (Ubercart to Commerce):
CodeLift executed a structured migration from the legacy Ubercart e-commerce system to Drupal Commerce. This involved carefully preserving membership purchase workflows, conference registration products, and PayPal payment integration. The new Commerce setup includes multiple product variation types for membership options, automated role assignment on purchase completion, and guest checkout with order assignment.
Complex Membership System:
MAC's sophisticated role-based membership system spans 11 distinct user roles -- including lifetime members, current members, board members, and conference registrants. The system features 15 block visibility groups for role-based content access. Custom modules ensure that completed purchases automatically assign appropriate user roles through rules-based automation, with membership renewal workflows fully intact.
Conference Registration Workflows:
The annual meeting registration system features complex pricing tiers (MAC members, non-members, students, tribal representatives), visibility-controlled content blocks, and presenter submission forms. Symposium organizer submissions and meeting preference collection systems were all preserved and enhanced.
Legacy Data Cleanup:
Custom update hooks were developed to clean up legacy Ubercart data structures and normalize file paths from previous migrations, ensuring the database is clean and optimized for the new platform.
Migration by the Numbers
- 566 configuration files migrated and verified
- 68 webforms preserved including conference registration
- 58 Views and 57 content blocks maintained
- 11 user roles with complex visibility rules preserved
- PayPal Commerce checkout fully operational
Infrastructure:
The site was deployed on Pantheon's enterprise hosting platform, providing robust infrastructure with development, test, and live environments. This enables safe updates and staging of changes before they go live, with Mailgun email integration for reliable transactional email delivery.
Ongoing Maintenance:
Under CodeLift's "Always on the Latest Version" service level agreement, MAC benefits from continuous security updates and version upgrades. The site will always run on the latest supported Drupal version with all security patches applied.
Why Drupal was chosen
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
