Directory.gov.au

Overview

Directory.gov.au is the Australian Government Directory, which lists government organisations, boards and the people in them. The project upgraded it from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9.

The challenge

Moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 is closer to a rebuild than an upgrade. The custom modules had to be rewritten, the theme refactored, and 10,000+ content items moved across without losing data integrity.

My role

• Custom modules: I migrated about 20 custom modules to Drupal 9, more than 500 hours of development, including the integration that pulls in directory items.
• Content migration: I wrote custom migration scripts with the Drupal Migrate API.
• Theme and database: I refactored the theme with modern CSS and optimised the MySQL database.
• Platform standards: I worked directly with the GovCMS Technical Product Owner on platform best practices and security hardening.

The solution

I rewrote the custom modules for Drupal 9, moved the content across with migration scripts built on the Migrate API, and refactored the theme with modern CSS.

The impact

Directory.gov.au moved off Drupal 7 onto Drupal 9, with all 10,000+ content items carried across and their data intact. Page loads on large directory queries came down to about 100 ms.