Helping the local government to utilise the power of Drupal 9
North Yorkshire County Council is the county council governing the non-metropolitan county of North Yorkshire in England.
NYCC’s own development team takes care of ongoing Drupal development, with Code Enigma handling core and contrib updates, both security and routine.
We've also worked with NYCC on their hosting, improving the speed and security of their local government website with AWS CloudFront.
Seamless migration of Drupal 8 sites to Drupal 9
With the fast approach of Drupal 8 EOL, and to enhance the overall site experience, our team worked to upgrade the five Drupal 8 sites to Drupal 9. For four of those sites, we handled the upgrades from start to finish, while for the fifth (the main https://www.northyorks.gov.uk site), we upgraded core and contrib, working with their internal dev team to finalise making their custom modules and theme Drupal 9 compatible.
Some of the custom modules and the theme are separate packages, so can be used on other NYCC sites, too.
What we did
After ensuring that the infrastructure met the Drupal 9 requirements, we followed our usual process of installing the upgrade status and upgrade rector modules.
Upgrade status is a big help when working through an upgrade. It does a lot of the grunt work for you, showing what module/theme updates are available, and their compatibility with Drupal 9. The project page gives a good example of the information you can expect to see.
For those modules or themes that don’t have a Drupal 9 compatible version available, it links you directly to the relevant issue queues, where you might find work on upgrading them already underway.
For custom code, it performs phpstan checks, plus other checks, to help identify potential Drupal 9 compatibility issues. While this can point you to compatibility issues in the code, upgrade rector can go one step further and generate patches to fix a lot of the issues. This certainly isn’t a magic bullet, but it does give you a big leap forward, saving a lot of legwork.
Outcome
All five of the North Yorks sites are now running Drupal 9.3, including their main https://www.northyorks.gov.uk site. It was great to work with Dom and the rest of the NYCC team, helping them through the upgrade process.
