Sector(s)
The group runs its online presence from a Drupal site factory: 50 country sites, each in its own languages, fed by headquarters and by country teams. Parker+Parker took over the platform, paid down the technical debt of the legacy code and maintained it for about four years. The work combined workshops with the group's teams, ticket handling, scheduled releases and the upgrade of the factory to Drupal 9.
About the project
Results
- 50 country sites maintained from a single codebase for about four years.
- The whole factory upgraded to Drupal 9 as part of maintenance.
- A takeover carried out without interrupting publishing on the country sites.
Goal
Stabilize a legacy platform, handle requests from several stakeholders and deliver on a regular schedule, without interrupting publishing in any country.
Challenge
The legacy code carried technical debt that had to be paid down before adding new features. Requests came from several stakeholders, at headquarters and in the countries, each with its own priorities. Every change had to work on 50 sites and in all their languages.
Solution
- Takeover and audit. Review of the legacy code, then a plan to pay down technical debt, prioritized with the client.
- Cleanup. Cleanup of the code and configuration shared by the 50 sites.
- Drupal 9 upgrade. Upgrade of the whole factory, across all country sites.
- Maintenance organization. Workshops with the group's teams, tickets tracked in the client's tool, prioritization, then scheduled and tested releases.
- Improvements. Search improvements, new pages and A/B testing.
What editors do without developers
Back-office editing fields were simplified: country teams publish their pages and news without developers.
Why Drupal was chosen
The site factory already ran on Drupal at the takeover. Replacing it would have meant migrating 50 country sites and retraining every local editor. Staying on Drupal made it possible to fix the legacy code in place and keep publishing on every site during the takeover. Thanks to multisite, a Drupal core feature, a single codebase becomes the unit of maintenance: a fix or a new feature reaches all 50 sites in the same release. Drupal's release schedule also made it possible to fold the Drupal 9 upgrade into regular maintenance, rather than run it as a separate project.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
No contributed module is central to this project. The 50 country sites share one codebase through Drupal core's multisite feature, so each fix is delivered once for the whole fleet.
