FrederickAbbott.com is the official website of Professor Frederick M. Abbott, an internationally renowned scholar and thought leader in the fields of international law, intellectual property, and global health policy. As the Edward Ball Eminent Scholar Professor of International Law at Florida State University, his website serves as a comprehensive archive of academic work, books, legal materials, presentations, publications, and global advisory contributions.
With a wealth of valuable resources and decades of scholarly material to preserve, the site required a robust and modern platform that ensured long-term accessibility, performance, and SEO optimization.
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The original site was built on Drupal 7. With Drupal 7 reaching end-of-life, a timely upgrade to Drupal 10 was necessary. The focus of the project was to migrate all media and structured content while maintaining data integrity and introducing a modern, responsive theme suited for academic publishing. No custom modules were required—just smart use of core capabilities, contributed modules, and efficient media migration.
The result is a simplified backend experience for content management, and a user-friendly, content-rich frontend that preserves the professional legacy of Professor Abbott.
Project Goals
- Platform Upgrade: Migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 to future-proof the site.
- SEO & Accessibility: Improve metadata management using SEO tools and ensure WCAG-compliant accessibility.
- Media Migration: Migrate hundreds of PDFs, images, and documents across presentations, publications, and events.
- Modern Theming: Rebuild the theme using Drupal 10 standards with a clean academic look.
- Content Preservation: Maintain and properly structure all academic materials including articles, books, and conference documentation.
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Challenges
- Media Structure Preservation: Ensuring file relationships (e.g., between publications and their downloadable PDFs) were retained.
- Layout Simplification: The original structure had deep and varied navigation; this needed simplification without loss of content integrity.
- SEO Best Practices: Migrating to a new platform required a careful setup of redirects, meta tags, and sitemap generation.
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Implementation Steps
- Site Audit & Planning
Analyzed the full architecture of the Drupal 7 site. Identified content types, taxonomy vocabularies, and media references that needed to be preserved. - Content & Media Migration
Used the Migrate API and contributed modules to move articles, presentations, books, images, and documents. Media types were mapped to new fields using Drupal 10's Media Library system. - Theme Rebuild
Created a fresh, minimalistic theme focused on clarity and legibility. Emphasized typography and accessibility standards to accommodate an academic audience. - Backend Simplification & SEO Setup
Installed and configured key SEO modules including Metatag and Simple XML Sitemap. Improved URL structure for better crawlability and navigation. Streamlined content types for easier content publishing.
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Results
- Fully Modernized Platform: Secure, scalable Drupal 10 setup with optimized backend.
- Enhanced Discoverability: SEO-optimized pages with improved search indexing and metadata.
- Better UX: Simplified structure and elegant theme for clear content exploration.
- Zero Downtime: Seamless transition without disruption.
- Preserved Legacy: FrederickAbbott.com now ensures long-term accessibility to decades of scholarly contributions.
Migrate to Drupal with Confidence
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Back to topDue to the robust content management systems, client was impressed with Drupal already.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
