When the City of Boston asked us to move boston.gov from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, there was no upgrade button to push. The two versions are different enough under the hood that the site had to be rebuilt from the ground up: thousands of pages, articles, and media assets, all while residents kept depending on the site every single day.
We started by designing a modern, modular site structure that would perform better and be easier to maintain, while carefully preserving the look and feel Bostonians already knew. Then came the hard part. We wrote custom migration scripts to map and transfer every piece of content, and we ran and re-ran them until nothing was lost: no pages, no files, no functionality.
A city website is only as good as the experience of the people who run it, so we built the new site around Drupal's paragraphs module. Editors can now assemble rich, structured pages from reusable content blocks without touching code. Content revisions and Workbench Moderation give departments the draft, review, and multi-stage approval workflows they need when dozens of contributors are publishing at once.
City employees log in with the same credentials they use everywhere else thanks to Single Sign-On through SimpleSAML, tied directly into the City's existing identity management system and meeting strict government security standards. The whole site complies with WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines, because a public website only works if everyone can use it.
The rebuilt boston.gov launched with its entire history intact, and it's faster, more accessible, and far easier for staff to manage. The City even set up boston.gov/Jantcu as a redirect to the Digital Team's webpage to commemorate the work, a small thank-you we're still fond of.
Visit the live site