The Complexities Some Sites Face & Chronos Stepping up Our Game

With Drupal 7’s end-of-life date approaching, Proofpoint turned to the Chronos team to perform a complicated online tango: Upgrade the technology platform supporting the website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, while simultaneously redesigning significant portions of the UI and extending a robust digital marketing juggernaut without breaking stride.

Anyone in the Drupal community can tell you, the move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is not an “in-place” upgrade. For a site of Proofpoint’s scope, this is a full site rebuild. The front end templates had to be entirely reproduced in Drupal 8’s Twig templating system, and legacy styles isolated from new and improved component styles. The complexity and design of the backend data structures necessitated significant manual architecting, migration, and revision to take advantage of Drupal 8 features like media.

All of this had to be achieved without interrupting or inhibiting the efforts of Proofpoint’s digital marketing team leveraging the Drupal 7 site as the organization’s most important demand generation tool right up to and through launch. No downtime, no significant content or functionality freezes could be imposed. On top of all that, take into consideration Proofpoint’s international stature, and eight languages requiring a brand new, entirely customized asymmetrical Lingotek translation integration.

Highlights

Highlights of the successfully completed migration include:

• Fully operational and customized Lingotek translation management system supports rapid dissemination of content to global audience;
• Consolidation of Marketo lead generation tools, significantly enhancing development efficiency and reducing error profile;
• Media Management capability reduces maintenance complexity and level of effort required to maintain the site;
• Substantial improvements to content components critical to Search Engine Optimization; Additional performant site search and search feedback analytics;
• Enterprise quality devops and workflow increases efficiency, eliminates potential for error, and ensures application code stability over the long-term;

Migration by the Numbers

Content, information architecture, page structures, data views and media were migrated from the Drupal 7 website to a new Drupal 8 website.

In total, 39 migration scripts were created to automate the migration of:

• 17,849 URLs
• 12,732 media items
• 9,137 pages of content, comprised of more than one hundred thousand individual content containers

In addition, backend structures were created and migration completed for:

• 164 data fields to support
• 14 content types
• 35 custom views, exposing hundreds of data fields in structured queries
• 35 Custom Blocks
• 36 Marketo forms
• 74 Paragraph Types (~15k individual paragraphs)
• 12 taxonomies (276 individual terms)
• 5 Media Types
• 2 Entity queues