Upgrading Everything: Using Remote Teams to Update Drupal + Change Platforms

Approaching a platform transition requires proper planning and execution on top of a serious technical architecture. Here we  will present how Mediacurrent  and Pantheon worked in tandem to migrate the NY State Senate site. Not long after a huge public launch, we began the plan to migrate the site to the Pantheon platform from 3 unique perspectives; the lead developer, the project manager and the platform provider.

Among the many challenges involved here, we were also facing an extremely short timeframe for executing the migration. Through detailed planning and execution we were able to accomplish all of our goals, but not without some tradeoffs. Pantheon utilizes a rigorous process for onboarding including maintaining a predefined 30 day period to ensure the process is seamless. The expedited delivery required continued engagement cycles with Pantheon’s Enterprise Onboarding Engineering team, who works to help test, migrate, and facilitate communication between layered development teams and environments.

The technical challenges we faced revolved around moving from one complex and feature rich platform to an equally complex and feature rich platform through use of scripting. Migration of this  large data set involved hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of gigabytes  of images. To top it off, an incredibly dense custom Solr search implementation had to be decoupled and ported to be environment compatible. Final steps include addressing unexpected issues in code that were not present on the original platform.

• Pantheon’s Multi-dev was integral to the migration and our paired programming environment with the client ( Mediacurrent and NY Senate )