The Brief
In 2017, The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the leading U.S. agency charged with public health efforts to advance the behavioral health of the nation, requested an evaluation of effort for migrating all of its websites from Drupal 7 to 8. An audit was performed and six individual Drupal sites, varying in size and scope, were selected for migration. Some, such as SAMHSA.gov, included tens of thousands of pieces of content, multiple API integrations, interactive calendars, and more, while others were simple online brochures with less than 50 pieces of content. Combined, Blue Water identified 1,970 modules, 7 themes, and more than 100,000 pieces of content in need of migration.
The Solution
Blue Water partnered with IBM to lead the development initiative, working on- and offsite in a variety of roles including technical project management, full-stack development, DevOps, systems administration, and more. Prior to migration, multiple developers, dev shops, and agencies had worked on SAMHSA’s Drupal 7 websites resulting in a codebase that followed different coding styles and design patterns. A major component of the migration, therefore, was to reduce the abovementioned technical debt and ensure that Drupal 8 best practices were followed globally. Upon evaluation, Blue Water discovered several areas where efficiencies could be found by consolidating and refactoring code, resulting in a significant reduction of necessary modules and lines of code; for example, the total number of modules required across the project dropped from 1,970 to 1,082.
The Outcome
Blue Water fulfilled its part of the partnership to the satisfaction of the client and delivered on its tasks at the highest level, resulting in the herculean migration process being completed in six months. In the words of the IBM managing consultant, “It was an absolute pleasure working with the developers and the management team through many difficulties and obstacles during which you met and surpassed my expectations. Blue Water showed the highest level of Drupal expertise we have seen.”
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