Business challenge
Our long-term client Alutech United sells solar panels and all kinds of shutters.
- Security shutters (kiosks, counters, pharmacy)
- Security doors
- Security grilles
Due to the upcoming Drupal 9 release, we advise our clients to get prepared and migrate to Drupal 8. The client needed to upgrade one of his Drupal 7 websites within the shortest time possible. No design changes were needed.
UPD: Our team has upgraded the company's website to Drupal 10.
Solution
As the most cost-saving solution, we advised integrating this website into the Drupal multisite system that we used for two other websites of the client.
What is a multisite system? What are its features?
Multisite is a system of sites that have one shared codebase where all the Drupal stuff and its core are kept. The sites themselves are put into sub-catalogs of this codebase. The websites have the same structure and if you change it, the changes appear throughout all the websites in this system.
There are many already preconfigured things.
- The old website’s content suited the structure of the multisite.
- We reused the products’ teasers and product description pages.
- Reusable contact forms.
That saved us (and the client) much time.
Also, on the old website, the feature Find a Dealer didn’t exist. But the multisite system includes this feature, so we added this functionality without much effort.
Within the multisite system, we can do some visual changes: change theme colors, change pictures in a slider, on pages, etc.
If you need to make the change on one website only, you apply changes in a particular website sub-catalog.
What about migration to Drupal 8? Technically, we had the existing Drupal 7 website and the ready-made structure of a Drupal 8 website in the multisite. So what we did was the content migration to Drupal 8 with some minor changes of the site structure.
There was one more benefit for the client. It may not seem that straightforward, but the migration to Drupal 8 multisite now lets us spend less time on security updates: since there’s the shared codebase for all the websites, we now apply the updates one time instead of four times (four is a number of websites in this multisite system).
Learn more about why it's important to migrate to Drupal 8.
Outcome
We migrated the website in less than a month and withing a pretty reasonable budget. Of course, we had the predefined multisite system which absolutely earned its keep.
We highly recommend building the multisite system if your client has:
- websites with similar features, layouts
- websites with similar content (online stores for different cities) that need some workflow for editing
- budget constraints and time constraints - but only together with any of the points above
Let me expand on the example with the online store. Imagine you have an ecommerce store with different prices for different cities: the product pages should be customized somehow to show the relevant information for cities. It is a minefield if you have just one site. But if you have separate multisites, you won’t have problems with variable prices as the changes on one multisite don’t lead to changes in others.
Ask for a free consultation to find the right solution for you. Contact us to migrate your website to Drupal.
