The Challenge
The client is an alumni magazine with features, campus coverage, alumni stories, class content, obituaries, current issues, and a substantial archive.
Moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 was not a routine software update. The site’s content model, theme, templates, contributed modules, editorial workflows, and historical content all had to be evaluated and rebuilt for a fundamentally different version of Drupal.
The magazine also had years of accumulated content. Articles, issues, departments, authors, class notes, obituaries, taxonomy, images, and archive relationships needed to survive the transition without forcing editors to relearn every part of their workflow.
The Approach
I contributed to the migration planning by inventorying the existing frontend and identifying the structures that needed to be preserved, replaced, or simplified. Instead of recreating every legacy decision, we treated the migration as an opportunity to determine which patterns still served the editorial team.
For the new theme, I organized the frontend around reusable Drupal and Twig components. Shared patterns handled article cards, metadata, editorial landing pages, issue content, navigation, promotional areas, and long-form story layouts. Tailwind, Webpack, and lightweight JavaScript behavior provided a more predictable development environment than the accumulated styling and scripts in the old theme.
Planning also covered content mapping, URL continuity, responsive behavior, accessibility, image handling, migration validation, and the differences between the old and new editorial interfaces.
The Result
The project replaced a legacy theme with a frontend designed around the magazine’s current content and workflow. The planning work reduced migration risk, while the new component architecture made future editorial features easier to implement without rebuilding the site section by section.