Migrating the top 50 most visited site in the U.S. onto Progressively Decoupled Drupal - Legacy.com

After over a decade of building a wide variety of applications to support their newspaper obituaries, editorial content, and search platforms, Legacy.com was looking to innovate on its front-end user experience. To achieve this goal, Legacy built a rock solid engineering team to take on the Node and React application which would eventually manage the presentation of Legacy’s full stack. Our focus was simple: support the portions of the site that needed content management, and do so in a way that would allow expansion of RESTful content services as new sections rolled out.

At a high level, the Legacy.com system is based on Drupal 7 CMS, React, Apache SOLR Search, and is hosted on Acquia Cloud. The frontend development was led by the in-house team at Legacy.com and Axelerant provided the necessary Drupal CMS implementation.

Although this is a decoupled system, it allows the Panels module use which enables administrators to modify the layout using Drupal’s backend. This layout is exposed via a RESTful service through the now contributed module, RESTful Panels, which was built for this project. This is a step in the right direction towards Progressive Decoupling, as discussed in the recent DrupalCon keynote by Dries Buytaert, project lead of Drupal.

In this presentation, Axelerant’s Ankur Gupta, Lakshmi Narasimhan, Hussain Abbas, Bassam Ismail  and Facet Interactive’s Jordan Ryan , will provide insights into the architectural decisions and best practices which helped address specific CMS, API, and migration requirements.

Architectural choices around specific concern areas around decoupled systems

• caching

• metatags

• content preview

• shortcode mapping

• redirects, etc.

Moreover, learn how Axelerant, Facet, and Legacy were able to work as a “Global and Continuous Delivery” team and achieve a record 4 month delivery timeline—which included site building, migration from MSSQL -> Drupal 7, api development, and performance testing.