Drupal Upgrade: Notre Dame of Maryland University.

Time to Upgrade

Notre Dame of Maryland university asked Simple Information for help with upgrading their Drupal 7 site (ndm.edu) to Drupal 8 and beyond. SI worked with NDM's internal IT staff with the following objectives in mind:

• Fix existing hard coded functions; that is, convert these to standard Drupal modules.
• Upgrade core and all supporting modules to Drupal 8 and Drupal 9.
• Transfer critical knowledge to in-house IT staff so they can maintain the site going forward.
• Upgrade hosting to an SI full hosting package including version control.

Mission Accomplished

SI was able to upgrade the site, meeting all deadlines and completing the project within budget.

SI implemented a version control system with several development servers and test sites, all included with SI's full service hosting. This gave NDM IT staff lots of test beds for testing new code and then pushing that code to live once automated testing had completed. This has eliminated down time and NDM now has an environment with all of the tools and functions they need without having to pay outrageous monthly costs.

Why it’s high time to Upgrade your Drupal site

Drupal 8 was released in November 2015, and Drupal 9 in June 2020. Drupal 10's release is tentatively scheduled June 2022, but may be pushed back to the end of 2022.

Support for Drupal 7 will end November, 2022. Support for Drupal 7 may be available from third parties after November, 2022, but why not just upgrade?

Here’s why it’s worth migrating to Drupal 9 now:

• It paves the way for easy and instant upgrades in the future. Drupal 9 will be almost like the latest version of Drupal 8, with just a good clean-up from deprecated code and the introduction of the latest libraries.
• Many experts recommend migrating your website to Drupal 8 as part of preparing for Drupal 9. For example, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert pictured D7 with an abandoned rail track, while the D8 track leads to D9 and beyond, so “you will never have to change the tracks again.”
• By migrating your site now, you are not wasting time but enjoying numerous and irresistible Drupal 8’s benefits for business. D8 is mobile-first, multilingual, open to integration with third-party apps, handy in content creation, respective of web accessibility standards, clean and efficient in code thanks to using OOP, Twig, HTML5, and so on.

Why not give us a call?

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