Sector(s)

Project Team

Team members: 

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

To help ensure themes weren’t using deprecated function calls, we implemented a process using Drupal Rector. During our usage, we identified gaps with API updates that Rector didn’t account for and had the opportunity to contribute these checks back.

Salsa Digital and the GovCMS/Finance team co-created a process to automatically migrate GovCMS sites to Drupal 9. This allowed GovCMS to offer migration services to its Drupal 8 agency clients, providing an easy pathway to an updated and supported distribution.

About the project

Back to top

GovCMS’ challenge

Drupal’s timeframe to end-of-life (EOL) Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 created an immediate need to support GovCMS D9. Careful consideration was needed to communicate, plan and technically transform GovCMS for D9.

Back to top

GovCMS’ transformation

Salsa Digital and the GovCMS/Finance team created an automation process to upgrade GovCMS D8 sites.  

The Salsa Digital/Finance team ran a tight loop of automation, test, learn, iterate. Hundreds of GovCMS sites were put to test, lessons learnt, upgrade automation refined, and tests repeated.  Each SaaS site was test-upgraded to D9 multiple times using the GovCMS continuous integration (CI) pipelines. These deployment (CI) processes built each site, using the same codebase and platform images as those used in production to accurately represent the upgrade process.

Common patterns were identified and lessons learnt fed back into the process. Automations were  updated to resolve common issues in project codebases, and tests repeated so we could be confident of the D9 upgrade.

After rigorous testing and iteration, and running test migrations on all GovCMS D8 sites, GovCMS was able to offer the service to its agency customers. The project took eight weeks and used agile methodology. 

Back to top

The outcomes

  • A proven GovCMS D8 to D9 automation framework 
  • A proven GovCMS D9 upgrade service
  • One-third of agency websites upgraded to D9 (as at June 2021), with many more scheduled
Back to top

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was chosen as the preferred CMS for Australia’s Federal Government through the creation of the GovCMS platform, which was launched in 2015. GovCMS is designed to make it easier for agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. Importantly, GovCMS provides a whole-of-government platform to help consolidation across government departments. The fact that Drupal is open source means there are no expensive lock-in contracts, and GovCMS can build a Drupal/GovCMS community. 

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used: