Sector(s)

Team Members

helene_bernard, romainj, h_habbous, g4mbini, intervalle

Project Team

DropTeam assembled a cross-functional team combining Drupal architecture expertise, DevOps/infrastructure skills, project management (Scrum), and front-end development. The team worked in close collaboration with ONERA's 4-person ACE team (polyvalent, with one Drupal specialist leading the internal effort) and the DCOM for design/branding guidance. The Agile Scrum methodology was adapted to a fixed-budget framework with 4-week sprints, weekly meetings, bi-daily standups, and sprint reviews with the ONERA Product Owner.

Organizations involved

  • ONERA — The French Aerospace Lab (client). DSI (IT Department), ACE team (Applications Collaboratives), DCOM (Communications Department).
  • DropTeam — Paris-based Drupal agency (32 Rue de Cambrai, 75019 Paris). Drupal architecture, development, migration, DevOps, training.

Team members

  • Michael FANINI — DropTeam, Project Director
  • Romain JARRAUD — DropTeam, Drupal Architect & Trainer (10+ years Drupal experience)
  • Juergen PECHER — DropTeam, Technical Director (25+ years)
  • Hélène BERNARD — DropTeam, Scrum Master (10+ years)

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

This large-scale migration project contributed to the Drupal community in the following ways:

  • Domain Access at scale validation: The project demonstrated that Domain Access can reliably power 55+ sites with diverse content models, proving the viability of this approach for large institutional site factories. Feedback on scalability and edge cases was shared with the Domain Access maintainers.
  • Module compatibility documentation: The detailed Drupal 7 → Drupal 10 module mapping (98 modules categorized as core-absorbed, Commerce-suite, obsolete, or community-ported) serves as a reference for other organizations planning similar large-scale migrations.
  • Knowledge sharing: The project methodology (audit → rationalize → industrialize → migrate → train) was documented and presented as a reference case for Drupal migration best practices in the French Drupal community.
  • New community members: ONERA's ACE team (4 people) received intensive Drupal 10 training, growing the pool of active Drupal practitioners in the French government/research sector.

ONERA (the French Aerospace Lab) is France's premier aerospace and defense research center. Its IT department (DSI) provided internal departments and research teams with a Drupal 7 multi-site installation hosting 55+ intranet websites, each serving a specific research department, geographic location, or administrative function.

With Drupal 7 reaching end-of-life, the entire ecosystem faced critical security, maintenance, and scalability challenges. The sites had accumulated significant technical debt: 200+ contributed modules (27% with no Drupal 9/10 port), 150 unused content types, outdated libraries, and inconsistent configurations across the fleet.

DropTeam, a Paris-based Drupal agency, was engaged to audit, rationalize, and migrate the entire site park into a modern Drupal 10 site factory. The project was executed in three phases over approximately 10 months, from early 2023 through late 2023.

About the project

The challenge

ONERA's 55+ Drupal 7 intranet sites served a critical role: they were the primary communication and collaboration platform for researchers, department heads, and administrative staff across multiple campuses (Palaiseau, Meudon, Toulouse-Salon, Châtillon, Lille, Modane). However, the aging infrastructure presented escalating risks:

  • Drupal 7 end-of-life meant no further security patches from the community.
  • Security update backlog: several sites were behind on critical patches.
  • Maintenance burden: 200+ contributed modules with inconsistent update status across sites.
  • No rationalization: each site had its own theme, its own configuration, and duplicated functionality (150 unused content types, 30+ empty taxonomy vocabularies, dozens of unused menus and webforms).
  • No CI/CD or version control: deployments were manual and error-prone.
  • No staging environment: changes went directly from development to production.

Goals

  1. Secure the platform by migrating to Drupal 10, a supported and actively maintained version.
  2. Rationalize the site portfolio through a comprehensive audit, eliminating technical debt (unused content types, orphaned modules, dead code).
  3. Industrialize operations by building a site factory architecture using Domain Access, reducing maintenance from 55 independent codebases to 2 managed platforms.
  4. Modernize infrastructure with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab), a proper staging environment, and Composer-based dependency management.
  5. Preserve content and functionality, migrating all configurations, content, users, taxonomy, and files.
  6. Enable autonomy through documentation and training for ONERA's DSI and ACE teams.

Approach — Three-phase methodology

The project followed an Agile Scrum methodology adapted to a fixed-budget context, organized in three phases:

Phase 1 — Target architecture definition (Sprint 0) Working with ONERA's ACE and DSI teams, DropTeam defined the target infrastructure: server requirements (PHP 8.1, MariaDB 10.3.7+, Apache 2.4), GitLab repository initialization, CI/CD pipeline design, and the Drupal 10 installation profile. Two user-story workshops identified the common feature set, and the backlog for both site factory platforms was formalized in Jira/Confluence.

Phase 2 — Platform development and site migration Two Domain Access-based multi-site platforms were developed:

  • A scientific editorial platform for department and campus communication sites (public/private content, multilingual support, LDAP authentication, Feeds-based user synchronization, Matomo analytics).
  • An event/e-commerce platform for conference and seminar registration sites (Commerce module suite, payment gateway integration via Monetico/Sogecommerce, invoice generation, registration workflows).

Both platforms shared a common foundation: a curated library of community themes (Olivero, TheX, Xara, Ruhi, Edux), a unified data model (10 content types covering editorials, news, events, publications, job offers, patents, partners, MOOCs), centralized taxonomy, Webform-based contact forms, and a full SEO stack (Pathauto, Metatag, Redirect, XML Sitemap).

Each of the 55+ sites was then migrated individually following a repeatable process: a framing workshop with the site's stakeholders → theme selection → new site provisioning in Domain Access → content migration (configurations + data) → QA validation → go-live.

Phase 3 — Security maintenance documentation and training DropTeam produced a comprehensive Security Maintenance Condition (MCS) document covering: new platform installation, version delivery procedures, security patch application, core/module updates, new site/domain creation, and rollback procedures. Training sessions were delivered for DSI administrators, site builders, and content contributors covering security best practices, developer tooling, and deployment industrialization.

Outcome and results

  • All 55+ Drupal 7 sites were successfully migrated to Drupal 10.
  • The site park was consolidated from 55 independent codebases into 2 Domain Access platforms, reducing maintenance effort dramatically.
  • Technical debt was eliminated: 150 unused content types removed, 30+ empty taxonomy vocabularies cleaned up, orphaned modules and libraries purged.
  • A proper DevOps pipeline was established: GitLab version control, CI/CD automated deployments, dev/staging/production environments.
  • ONERA's teams gained full autonomy to create new sites, apply security updates, and manage content without external intervention.
  • Migration rate achieved: 2–3 sites per week during the migration sprints.

Why Drupal was chosen

ONERA had been running Drupal 7 for years and had deep institutional expertise with the CMS. The evaluation of alternatives confirmed that Drupal remained the best fit for several reasons:

  • Multi-site at scale: Drupal's architecture, combined with the Domain Access module, enabled a true site factory model where 55+ sites share a single codebase and database while maintaining independent content, themes, and configurations. No competing CMS offered this level of multi-site maturity for an on-premise, security-sensitive government research environment.
  • Enterprise security posture: As a defense research institution, ONERA required a CMS with a dedicated security team, a proven track record in government deployments, and granular permission controls. Drupal's security advisory process, its adoption by NATO, the European Commission, and similar agencies, made it the natural choice.
  • Content modeling flexibility: With 339 content types across the fleet (articles, scientific publications, events, patents, job offers, MOOCs, partner pages, etc.), ONERA needed a CMS that could handle highly diverse and structured data models. Drupal's entity/field system and contributed modules like Paragraphs and Webform were unmatched.
  • Ecosystem maturity for Drupal 10: Analysis showed that roughly 64% of the existing modules were already in Drupal 10 core or Commerce, and 22% had well-maintained contributed equivalents. Only 14% were truly obsolete, making the migration path clear and de-risked.
  • Composer and modern PHP tooling: Drupal 10's embrace of Composer, PHP 8.1+, Symfony components, and Twig templating aligned with ONERA's goal to adopt modern DevOps practices (CI/CD pipelines, GitLab, Docker containerization).
Onera screenshots

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

The module selection was driven by a rigorous audit of the existing Drupal 7 stack. Of the 98 modules analyzed, 41.8% were already absorbed into Drupal 10 core (Views, CTools, Entity API, Date, etc.), 21.4% were part of the Drupal Commerce suite, and 14.3% were obsolete (jQuery Update, IMCE, PHP Filter, Rules). The remaining 22.4% were well-maintained community modules considered essential and already ported to Drupal 10.

Domain Access was chosen over traditional Drupal multi-site because it provides a single codebase AND a single database, making maintenance, updates, and content sharing between sites significantly simpler. The trade-off (shared functionality across all domains) was acceptable since the audit revealed that the 55 sites shared essentially the same feature requirements.

The theme strategy deliberately leveraged high-quality community themes rather than building custom themes from scratch. This decision dramatically reduced development time while still giving each department the ability to choose a distinct visual identity. Custom sub-themes allowed per-site CSS adjustments (logos, colors, layout tweaks) on top of the community base themes.

LDAP integration modules were essential as ONERA uses centralized LDAP-based authentication for its intranet, with automated user synchronization per department via the Feeds module.