Volkman Software

Drupal upgrades and migrations.

Moving a site off Drupal 7, or up to Drupal 10 or 11, without losing content, links or search. I plan the move, migrate the content, update or replace the code, and stay on after launch.

Taking on new projects now, directly or through agencies.

What I handle

Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 or 11

Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025, so it no longer gets security fixes from the Drupal community. Getting off it is a rebuild of the code with a migration of the content: content types, fields, users, files, menus and URL aliases move over with Drupal's Migrate API, in scripts that can be rerun until launch day.

Major-version upgrades

Drupal 9 or 10 up to the current release: updating custom modules and themes for removed APIs, moving to supported versions of contributed modules, and the PHP and Composer changes that come with it.

Modules with no upgrade path

Contributed modules that were never ported get replaced with maintained ones or a small custom module, with their data migrated across.

Search, hosting and everything around it

Rebuilding search on Search API with Solr or SearchStax (see Drupal search), redirects so old links keep working, and launches on Acquia or other hosting.

How a migration runs

  1. Audit. Content types, modules, custom code, integrations and traffic, so the plan covers what the site really does.
  2. Plan. What moves as-is, what gets simplified, what gets replaced, and what can be dropped.
  3. Migrate in repeatable steps. Migration scripts run against a copy of the live site again and again, so content added during the project still comes across at launch.
  4. Check side by side. Old and new sites compared page by page, plus redirects for every old URL.
  5. Launch and stay on. A final content sync, the switch-over, and support afterwards for anything that turns up.

Examples

A B2B site with a large product database

Years of product data had been entered without a consistent structure, so it couldn't be mapped field to field. I wrote migrations that cleaned up and reshaped the data on the way in, backed by a complete suite of automated tests to verify the results, and the launch went smoothly.

A B2C brochure site

Several overlapping content types were consolidated into two, so editors had fewer, clearer choices and the content moved over cleanly. A set of poorly written custom modules was replaced with well-maintained contributed modules, leaving just three small custom modules to look after.

For agencies

I can take the migration off your plate, white-label or alongside your team, working in your repositories, ticketing and process.

Get in touch

Tell me which Drupal version you're on and roughly how big the site is.