Everything You Need to Know

to Start Your Drupal 9

Migration Journey
A step-by-step guide for a successful Drupal 9 Upgrade

Authored by

Delona Lang Director – Partnerships and Customer Success

Ameex Technologies Corp.

www.ameexusa.com www.drupalgeeks.com
 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Why Should You Switch to Drupal 9?

Why Upgrade Now?

Upgrade vs. Re-build

Drupal 9 Upgrade Path – Best Practices

Roadmap Development
Assign Product Owners from Your Marketing and IT Teams
Platform Readiness Assessment Checklist
Your Ideal Path to Drupal 9

Ameex’s Advantage and Strategy

Our Upgrade Methodology
Time and Cost Savings with Our Digital Accelerators
Our Outcome Driven Engagement Model

Featured Case Study

Our Successful Drupal 9 Migration for Koenig Equipment
 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Introduction To deliver exceptional customer experiences, your marketing and IT

team needs flexible technologies to collaboratively launch and evolve

experiences that drives successful outcomes. This eBook dives deep

into how you can benefit from Drupal 9, the importance of aligning

your marketing and IT teams, and what it takes to plan and execute a

successful Drupal 9 migration.

Why Switch to Drupal 9?

Released in June 2020, Drupal 9 is the most flexible, easy-to-use, and secured Drupal version to
date. It offers:

Enhanced Content Authoring Experience Faster Time to Market

Drag and drop elements in the layout builder The self-reliant authoring experience
eliminate dependency on developers and creates quicker time to market for your
allows content authors to self-serve their digital assets, improves engagement, and
needs. increases conversions.

Headless Architecture Improved MarTech Performance

Drupal 9 offers REST API by default in the REST API gives the ability to connect or
core to help brands deliver content in integrate with any third party MarTech tools
multiple channels and devices. and it helps streamline the process and
improve your MarTech stack’s performance.

Implement Personalization Strategies Better Security

Through personalization modules, Acquia Higher versions of PHP, the right PHP
Personalization, or any other third-party plugins/modules, and OOPS programming
personalization engines, you can get deep methodology helps to enhance code
insights into your customer buying patterns, quality and reduces vulnerabilities. With
syndicate content, and deliver relevant and the removal of deprecated codes, your site
contextual experiences. is more secured.

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Improved Performance Simplified Process for Managing Updates

Drupal 9 delivers enhanced performance The update and upgrade processes are
through an improved caching mechanism simplified using Composer. Composer
available by default in the core. allows you to easily install minor updates or
manage contributed modules and themes.

Easy Custom Feature Development More Accessible

For example, if you are developing a weather To make the site accessible for different
report widget from a 3rd party application, groups of users, Drupal 9 provides
in Drupal 7 you need to write a new module, optimized built-in HTML structure support
whereas in Drupal 9 it becomes simple by for 100 languages, voice and visual search,
using the existing module and creating a and more.
block plugin to integrate the widget.

Better Backend Management Migrate API

A clean/improved UI and admin navigation Drupal 9 provides easy migration

system help to better manage the content, capabilities from other CMS’s to Drupal
taxonomy, users, blocks, themes. using migrate API tools.

Optimized Code Structure

In Drupal 7, the necessary/required files

need to be included using “require
statement” that will load all the files on
each page consuming more resources and
impact on site performance. Whereas in
Drupal 9, the autoload feature is available
default at the core that allows the
modules/blocks loaded only when
required.
Create Winning Experiences
Drupal 9 is simple for content editors,
robust for adminstrators, secure and
accessible for users

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

“
“Drupal 9.0 represents 4 ½ years of improvement and developed by more than 4,500 individual
contributors ever done to any open source CMS.”

Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead, Drupal

Drupal 7

Drupal 6
Happy Path – All future updates
are seamless because of the
four factors
. Scheduled Releases

. Semantic Versioning (8.8.1)

. Experimental Projects / Features

. Process of Deprecation

Once you upgrade to Drupal 9, all future major updates will be significantly
easier, and it keeps you on the continuous innovation cycle with feature
additions twice a year.

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Why Upgrade Now?

In these unprecedented times, every brand must
understand how to strengthen their digital footprint, drive
more sales, and deliver relevant customer experiences.

Upgrading your site to the latest version of your CMS

helps you take advantage of new features, modules,
compatibility, security, and performance. You will be
armed with the latest and greatest technology to deliver
How timely upgrade helps?
amazing customer experiences that could drastically
improve your bottom-line. • Strengthen your digital core to
meet growing business needs
Are you hesitating to upgrade?
• Deliver relevant experiences
Have you had a bad experience with upgrades? and gain competitive edge

Do find upgrades expensive and time-consuming? • Improve ROI of your Drupal

solutions
Are you worried that an upgrade will negatively impact
your customer data, SEO, content, site security?

Allow us to help you put your mind at ease.

The secret to a successful upgrade is having the right

team behind you who can build a comprehensive
upgrade plan and ensure the process is agile, lossless,
and cost-effective.

Upgrade vs. Re-build

The goal with Drupal 9 is to have a powerful modern site designed to engage and activate
your customers.

To achieve this, should you upgrade or re-build? It depends on how your Drupal site is
configured and how well you have kept up with the latest updates.

If you are already in Drupal 8 and your website has a simple architecture, upgrading to
Drupal 9 is pretty simple.

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

If your Drupal 8 site has a complex architecture, you

need to start by refactoring the code. Refactoring means Upgrade vs. Rebuild –
restructuring code without changing its external What’s the best approach?
behaviour and functionality. Then, you can upgrade to
Put your customers first.
Drupal 9.
Understand their journey and
build the experience that keeps
If you are in Drupal 7 or Drupal 6, you need to rebuild
them engaged.
your site because Drupal 9 significantly changed the way
content and configuration are stored in the database.

Drupal 9 Upgrade Project Path – Best Practices

Roadmap Development
Before developing an upgrade roadmap, identify the needs of the key product owners, help
create a collaborative environment, and come together to develop the right strategy for the
upgrade process.

Key Questions for Your Marketing and Business Teams

• What are their pain points?

• Are they able to build landing pages fast and launch

campaigns quickly? Upgrades Can Help in
Digital Transformation, Too
• Does the platform help them deliver content across channels?

• Are they getting the right data on their customers and be able Executives say the top
to implement personalization strategies? benefits of digital
transformation are improved
Key Questions for Your IT Team operational efficiency (40%),
• Is the platform flexible? faster time to market (36%),

• Are they able to reduce maintenance costs? and the ability to meet
customer expectations (35%).
• Is there any performance or security-related issues?

• Is the hosting server scalable enough to handle sudden traffic Source : PTC and CorporateLeaders Survey 2018

surges or is there any website downtime?

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Assign Product Owners Product Owners are

from Your Marketing Responsible For
and IT Teams • Meeting the end goals of Marketing and IT
teams
In order for the upgrade project to succeed,
• Defining KPIs
your marketing and IT teams must be aligned.
• Unifying the team
We recommend assigning a project owner
• Building relationships
from each team throughout the project.
• Knowledge support

• Handling all project communication

• Ensuring the project gets completed on time

Platform Readiness Assessment Checklist -

Identifying Key Improvement Areas
Strategy Navigation and Information
Architecture
Is your digital strategy aligned with
Are you fulfilling customer expectations,
your overall business strategy?
or disappointing them?
Is your content easy to find?
Digital Core
Does your platform and application Front-end Design
allow you to meet evolving business Does your website deliver high mobile
Digital
needs? Technology responsiveness?

Data
User
Science and
Experience
Practices

Marketing
Capabilities Marketing Channels Optimization
KPI
Are you able to gather organization-wide Which channels are working for you?

KPIs to improve customer experience? Do you appear high up on search engine

ranking page results?

Data Collection
Are you getting a single view of your Landing Page Optimization

customer to implement deep Are you delivering frictionless experience

personalization strategies? and making users act on the CTAs?

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Your Ideal Path to Drupal 9

From Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 From Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 From Drupal 7 or Prior

(For Simpler Sites) (For Complex Sites) to Drupal 9

Upgrade is similar to your • Begin with compatibility Involves typical migration

regular updates check process for all types of
sites
• Review deprecation code • Upgrade status module
usage (Key module) • Need to consider if a
complete change in
• Perform minor updates • Install and enable upgrade
architecture required
to the modules status module
• Check for compatible
• Test the codes in Drupal 8 • Scan the contributed and
contributed modules
production environment custom modules (Look for
deprecated/incompatible • Re-write custom
• Update the core to codes) modules
Drupal 9
• Update the modules • Check update
complexity. (Need to
• Check the status to confirm
ensure if functionalities
• If the custom module is not are working right)
compatible, make the
• Content migration
corrections to remove the
deprecated codes • Theme rebuilding

• Test in Drupal 8 production

environment

• Then, update the core to

Drupal 9 (with one of the
recommended methods
using composer)

How to Plan the Right Upgrade Process

Conduct an in-depth assessment of your platform and current processes,
understand the digital maturity level, areas of improvement, and plan the upgrade
process accordingly.

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Ameex’s Advantage and Strategy

Our Upgrade Methodology

Drupal Upgrade Process – How We Do It!

Analyse Existing CMS

• Understand how the content,
files, users etc. are stored
• Analyse features and existing
architecture
• Report and documentation

Content Inventory
• List all content types
• Identify duplicate contents
• Upgrade planning and
documentation

Upgrade Process
• Use any software or write custom
scripts for upgrade
• Maintain log file for upgrade
• Migrate URL structure of the page
if needed
Content Cleaning / Revision
• Migrate file (video, pdf, etc), if
any that resides within the content
• Replace absolute URL with the
relative URL
• Clean / Update content if there is
any issue with the format
SEO
• Add redirects if the URL of the
page is changed
• Migrate meta-tag, page title
• Update inline 404 links with
the new one
Test and Validate
• Ensure all content is migrated in
the excepted format
• Validate SEO data of the page
• Check if there is any 404 pages
exist

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Time and Cost Savings with Our

Digital Accelerators
We have 13 years of experience in reviewing, auditing, fixing, and re-engineering Drupal

systems. Ameex has developed our own digital accelerators that will make your upgrade

process fast and easy for websites regardless of their complexity.

Some Benefits of our Digital Accelerators:

• Up to 50% reduction in time and cost for both development and maintenance

• Seamless and intuitive content authoring experience

• Ability to quickly create a landing page or localize a page or site

• Efficient and reusable code base using the right Drupal modules and APIs to improve
efficiency and security

• Ability to quickly integrate with SIS, MarTech, Data, and other business systems

• Robust content and dynamic query architecture to accelerate your site-building needs

• Powerful taxonomy structure to support your site’s organic SEO needs.

• Advanced security features including OWASP Top 10

• Multi-site management capabilities. AMP, PWA features

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Our Outcome Driven Engagement Model

We have delivered successes to our clients with an Outcome-Based Model/Approach.

We commit to meeting performance benchmarks including page load time, stability,

security, scalability, and more post-Drupal 9 upgrade.

Assured Performance Benchmarks

• Total development time • Stability testing

• Maintenance cost • Security testing

• Quick time to market • SEO metrics

• Localization of site • Conversion

• Total cost of ownership • Analytics maturity

• Page load time • Data management and Cloud implementation

• Google page speed

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 FEATURED CASE STUDY

Integrating Content and Commerce for

Koenig Equipment on Drupal 9

Project Overview
Koenig Equipment has provided lawn, garden, and agriculture equipment solutions for over 115 years and
is currently operating in 15 locations across Indiana and Ohio. They are one of the early adopters of a
digital business landscape delivering content-driven commerce experience for their customers. Ameex was
approached to enhance their site experience further with better backend and frontend usability, deliver
top-notch performance, and improve search engine ranking page results.

Ameex and Koenig Equipment – Strong

and Successful Relationship
Ameex maintenance and support team has been supporting their website needs with site updates and
periodic health checks for several months. Our team were is addressing internal stakeholders’ needs such as
content updates, security updates, bug fixes, integrations, and more. Our team set a collaborative
environment for their team and built a solid and rewarding relationship.

Opportunity Areas
Koenig Equipment’s website is complex and content-heavy with several features and functionalities. Our team
of Drupal Consultants, Digital Strategists, and Drupal Solutions Architects conducted an extensive discovery
process and identified areas for improvement.

• Simplifying e-commerce payment experience

• Enhancing search functionality, events, product, blogs, and news listing pages

• Enabling easy content creation for different users

• Better backend management

• Optimizing website for local searches and improving organic traffic

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Solutions Offered
Seamless Migration of Complex Drupal 7 Site to Drupal 9
To enhance the overall site experience, our team proposed to migrate their site from Drupal 7 to Drupal
9. A site of such complexity requires a complete rebuild and our Drupal experts recommended it to build
on top of Pantheon WebOps Platform. Drupal 9 and Pantheon is a unique combination in the market and
despite many felt it is not possible to launch a site with too many functionalities and cron jobs, our team
migrated with ease and won appreciation from our partner team at Pantheon.

Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 Migration – in 5 phases:

Phase 01 – Core migration, theme development

Phase 02 – Commerce migration

Phase 03 – Site development, Contributed module migration

Phase 04 – Custom module migration, Intranet portal development, Open solr integration,
Events/Calendar revamp

Phase 05 – Enhanced commerce workflow (cart, checkout, review, payment), payment integration,
blogs and news page, cookie consent, social share in product detail page

Implementing Cron Job Functionality to Render Content

To display up-to-date information on John Deere products, our team implemented Cron job functionality to
render content directly from the John Deere site thus eliminating the need for manual content authoring and
publishing. Although the Cron job function brought several challenges, our team incrementally resolved them
and delivered seamless content display. Cron job functionality is also extended to display Koenig News,
Industry News, Futures, and Weather Report.

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Rebuilt Custom Modules on Drupal 9

Our team rebuilt nearly 40 custom modules that were existing on their Drupal 7 site on Drupal 9. Some
of the custom modules includes Koenig Search, Koenig Specials, Koenig Online Billpay, Koenig Locations,
Koenig Intranet, and more.

Easy Online Shopping Experience

To make the purchase/reordering experience easier, our team implemented Bill Pay feature in which the
customer can organize all their recurring bills in one place and pay them by just entering the amount and
account number. The Bill Pay feature is integrated with Authorize.net for safe and secured transactions.

Enhanced Web Experience

To give customers better access to information, we implemented Open Solr Search that provides accurate
information on the site with advanced filters. Our UX experts further enhanced display of events in the calendar,
blog and news/listing pages and made the experience much more relevant and engaging for end users.

Better User Roles and Permission Management

Our team developed 15 user roles for Koenig employees to access different areas of the site to add or edit
content. A customized admin dashboard was developed for exclusive access by the Super Administrator for
managing user roles and permissions better and built a dashboard for Store admin to access information on
store orders and customers.

Improving Search Engine Results

Parallelly our search engine optimization experts conducted an extensive SEO audit and provided a roadmap to
improve their search engine ranking page results. From content to architecture, HTML, backlinking and internal
linking, our team optimized each area that impacts SEO and helped them witness 50% increase in local organic
traffic. We carefully planned Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migration process to ensure the search rankings didn’t get
impacted post-launch in fact, we are seeing improved rankings after migrating to Drupal 9.

New Features Enabled

Intranet Menu User Dashboard Content Creation Custom Functionality

Access Permission Permission for (Drupal admin menu, John
specific users Deer update, Equipment
feed monitoring, Intranet
Product Display)

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Rebuilt Custom Modules on Drupal 9

Slider Menu Product Listing

Sticky Footer Printer Friendly

Google Map Integration Newsletter signup and forms

Search with Filter Career – Iframe integration (paycor)

E-commerce Event calendar

Value Delivered with Drupal 9 Migration

Quick
3 months
Migration 200% 146% 3sec
New site was launched 200%
Increase
increase
in newin 146% increase
Increase in in 3 second
Avg. pageavg.load
page
infollowing
3 monthsthefollowing
Agile new
users
users sessions time
load time
reduced
thatfrom
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process
process 5.8 5.8
second
second
earlier

1sec 300% 200% 40%

1 second
Server is
response
the server Over
Increase
300%in desktop
increase Over
Increase
200%in increase
mobile 40%
YoYYoY
increase
increase
in in
response
reduced
which
to was in desktop
users users in mobile
usersusers conversions through
2.1 2.1
second
second
earlier location pages

“
“At Koenig Equipment we have been on Drupal for many years and have a complex site with several customizations.

It was important for us to find a Drupal partner that would allow us to maintain the functionality of our existing site

and upgrade us to take advantage of the functionality and security improvements available in Drupal 9. Ameex

delivered. Their team took on the task and remained on schedule even when unexpected challenges were

uncovered. The communication with the team was great and included regular updates on the progress of the

project. I would recommend Ameex to handle anyone’s Drupal project.”

Aric Koenig, IT Director, Koenig Equipment

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

Schedule a Meeting with Our Expert Team and Get your Free
Drupal 9 Pre-Upgrade Assessment and Quote

Write to us: [email protected]

Our Experts on Why Clients Choose us for

their Upgrade Projects

Ken Lowenberg Aaditya Rajkumar

Director, Digital Marketing and Technology Digital Solutions Architect

“An Upgrade goes beyond just Technical "Innovative Mindset - Our accelerators
– We work with you to enhance -- and and migration processes help clients
sometimes redefine -- digital strategy, fix expedite their migrations at lower cost.”
experience gaps, and build the right digital
stack for you to deliver powerful, unified,
contextual customer experiences.”

Delona Lang Brett McCoin

Director, Partnership and Customer Success Director, Business Development

“Customer-Centric - We put our clients “Proven Experience – Our Drupal experts

and their customers first when we build specialize in building easy to use, flexible,
your perfect Drupal-based solutions.” and extendable Drupal applications that
empower marketing and technology
teams to surpass their digital priorities.”

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 Start Your Drupal 9 Migration Journey

About Ameex
Ameex Technologies is a digital transformation and delivery partner helping
clients ideate, design, build, and deploy next generation, deeply integrated
digital technology solutions. Established in 2007, we bring together content,
commerce, and technology to deliver an omnichannel experience to our
clients.

Our industry knowledge combined with our deep expertise in leveraging

standardized processes, automation, data-driven analytics, and artificial
intelligence/machine learning allows us to deliver a personalized experience
across different platforms.

About the Author

Delona Lang
Director – Partnerships and Customer Success Ameex Technologies Corp

Delona is the Director of Partnerships and Customer Success with

Ameex. She has more than 10 years of experience in helping
clients deliver Drupal-based digital solutions and has been an
integral part of the Drupal Organization for over five years.

Email: [email protected]

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