At a glance

$101K-$200K
2022 - 2023
9 to 12 months
Completed
GovCMS, Drupal
Federal government
Discovery & strategy, Build & migration, Support & optimisation
GovTech, Whole of government, Open platform, Web development, Content management systems, Drupal Planet
Multidisciplinary teams, Agile delivery, Tools & systems, Open standards & common platforms, Open source, Testing

Overview

GovCMS’ challenge

With Drupal 9 coming to End-of-Life (EOL), GovCMSExternal Link needed to start its D10 upgrade project. Drupal 10External Link introduced widespread deprecations, which meant major upgrade work. GovCMS wanted to automate the upgrade process as much as possible to reduce the burden on its clients.

GovCMS’ transformation

Salsa started with an assessment of the sites impacted by the deprecations in the theme layer and identified the highest value fixes. We started with 3,500+ deprecations across the 300+ sites and worked through several rounds of fixes. Over 10 months, we implemented platform-wide fixes, bringing down the number of deprecations each time. We then did the final automated upgrade runs from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 in October 2023.

The outcomes

  • A seamless upgrade path that took responsibility away from end users

  • Consolidation of effort to reduce overall resource effort and costs

  • An automated process for 300+ sites

Detailed case study

Below is detailed information on the challenge, transformation and final outcomes/benefits.

GovCMS’ challenge — Drupal 9 End-of-Life

With Drupal 10External Link released in December 2022 and Drupal 9 coming to EOL in November 2023, GovCMSExternal Link needed to start planning and implementing its D10 upgrade program.

Drupal 10 is a major release that introduced widespread deprecations to the templating engine (Twig), removal of several jQuery libraries, as well as many PHP and API-level changes. This meant the central GovCMS distribution needed major upgrade work, as well as the 300+ SaaS sites that had customisations in the theme layer. GovCMS wanted to automate the upgrade process as much as possible and provide confidence for the many site permutations in the GovCMS ecosystem.

GovCMS’s transformation — an automated pathway to Drupal 10

As a starting point, we leveraged some of the work and learnings from the automated upgrade pathway from Drupal 8 to 9. However, upgrading Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 was a much bigger challenge because:

  • There were a lot more websites on the platform (300+)

  • There were more changes in the theme this time around, which meant there were more widespread issues in each SaaS site

We started with an assessment, creating and running an audit tool to assess what sites were impacted. From there, we identified common patterns between issues and worked closely with the distribution team to resolve issues broadly for the entire platform. Issues were resolved with platform tooling and distribution updates to make the upgrade process as seamless as possible. We were looking at 100s of iterations per site to try to find, resolve, and test anything that can be automated as part of a platform-wide upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.

The high-level process was:

  1. CI pipeline spinup

  2. Generate reports and artefacts for each site to find the deprecated code

  3. Analyse the reports to:

    1. Identify improvements and resolutions that could be made at the distribution level

    2. Identify additional platform tooling to help with smooth upgrades

  4. Collaboratively fix issues with distribution code changes and platform tooling

  5. Create feature environments with fixing applied so customers can review their sites and devs can review the code

  6. Merge for final release

We started with 3,500+ deprecations identified across the 300+ sites and worked through several rounds of fixes, each time bringing down the number of deprecations. Over a 10-month period we continued with this process until we were only left with issues that needed manual remediation.

The final automated upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 took place in October 2023.

The outcomes — GovCMS platform and 300+ sites upgrade to D10

  • A seamless upgrade path that took responsibility away from end users (we did it centrally instead of 100s of people/clients having to do it themselves)

  • Consolidation of effort to reduce overall resource time and costs

  • An automated process for 300+ sites (to our knowledge no other platform has executed this scale of automation for Drupal upgrades)

About GovCMS

The Department of FinanceExternal Link (Finance) owns the GovCMS platformExternal Link , a whole-of-government digital platform for use across all levels of government in Australia. GovCMS is built on DrupalExternal Link , an award-winning, enterprise-grade CMS that’s easy to use, stable, highly secure and open source (no license fees).