 I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar, which is being brought to you by the WDB agency in partnership with Acquia. We will be focusing on the upcoming end of life for Drupal 7, what that means to both marketing and IT, the benefits that Drupal 9 offers, and who to partner with for a seamless migration process. My name is Jim Christensen. I lead the sales and marketing departments at WDB and will be moderating today's webinar. Just a few quick housekeeping items. During the webinar, all attendees will be muted. If you are dialing into the presentation, please mute your phone. A couple of poll questions were just launched. If you could take a moment to complete both questions that will be very beneficial to the information we will be sharing post webinar. A recording of today's presentation will also be available and sent out within the next week. Lastly, if you have any questions that you would like to ask our speakers, please feel free to submit them at any time during the presentation. We will be conducting a Q&A at the end, and if for any reason we're not able to get to those questions, we will follow up, post show directly. I'd like to now introduce our speakers for today. Gil Desanski and Kat Cullinane. Gil is the founder and CTO at WDB Agency. Gil is a long time software developer and open source enthusiast with a strong interest in usability and design considerations. He acts as a liaison for WDB's clients, translating their specific digital goals and strategic direction into technical requirements to help them achieve or surpass business objectives. Kat is an associate product marketing manager on Acquia's Drupal Cloud product marketing team. Her expertise resides in Acquia's Edge, China Managed Services, and Acquia Migrate product portfolios. In her free time, she can be found spoiling her cat Freya and working on her newest do-it-yourself projects. Now, before we dive into Drupal, I wanted to take a step back to look at the digital landscape as a whole. John Mueller, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, had a great quote when it comes to content. When it comes to the quality of the content, we don't mean just the text of your articles. It's really the quality of your overall website, and that includes everything from the layout to the design. So when content is being created for your online brand, it truly is much more than just the words that are written. It's how you have things presented on your pages, how you integrate images, how you work with speed. All of those factors come into play to create a positive user experience. Another vital component to your strategy is your CMS, as your content management system is one of the most critical aspects of your digital brand identity. It impacts your brand proliferation, loyalty, conversions, traffic, bounce rate, indexability, retention rate, and site speed. In this digital economy, your customers expect superior features, functions, and interactions on your website. If you are making your customers walk through a labyrinth to find the information they're looking for, chances are that you're losing them to your competitor who has engaged with them on solving their problems faster. Now that we've taken a macro level look at today's digital landscape, I'd like to hand it over to Kat, who will focus on Drupal 7 and its impending end of life. Thanks, Jim. So recently, the Drupal project decided to extend Drupal 7's end of life until November 28, 2022. Well, that may seem like plenty of time, it is less than a year away, and most migrations often take a minimum of a few months. While AQUIA is providing Drupal 7 extended support through 2025, the purpose of doing so is to provide you with the time you need in case your migration ends up going past the end of life deadline. Rather than allowing users to operate on D7 indefinitely. We are currently in the midst of Drupal 9 support, Drupal 8 having passed its end of life date this past November, with the start of Drupal 10 on the horizon for mid 2022. As you can see here, 55% of Drupal users are still on Drupal 7 and will need to make the move prior to November 2022, or continue to invest in their outdated solutions while still needing to plan for the eventuality of upgrading and the costs that come with it. If you're the owner of the 55% of Drupal sites that are still on Drupal 7, you may be wondering what the upgrade path looks like to go from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9. Jim will walk you through that shortly. Thanks, Kat. I realize seeing that Drupal 7's end of life being less than a year away can be a bit overwhelming. Rest assured, once November of 2022 is here, Drupal Geden will not be taking place. Your website will still be functioning, but there are vital components that will cease to exist. Support, like Kat had stated, Drupal 7 support will end next November, so unless you pay for extended options through partners like Acquia, there will be no community-wide assistance like there is now. Security, keeping your website and customers' data safe is vital for any business. One of the golden safety rules is to apply security updates in Drupal regularly. After the end of support, Drupal will release no more security updates, therefore you will be exposed to more vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. Advancements. Technology advancements are mandatory benefactors when you need to adapt to keep up the pace. A defined upgrade schedule ensures you embrace the current and are compatible with the latest range of emerging technologies. And lastly, added functionalities. Regardless of your database size and feature set, pursuing enhancements for your evolving website's goals consistent with your branding and external factors is an important aspect of maintaining an SEO-friendly website. This will not be possible for the old versions of Drupal. With all the focus around needing to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, it's important to understand the benefits that will come with this upgrade. Drupal is built around marketers and content authors' needs. If you are not on Drupal, you're truly missing out. Here's why. As marketers have moved to digital, you're responsible for not managing just your website but the entire MarTech stack. Drupal outshines here as it offers excellent API capabilities which allows you to centralize and optimize your digital assets from one place. The ability to serve your web users a personalized content experience at the right time in the right format from segmenting visitors across devices to tracking and reporting with AB and multivariate testing. Web analytics are an important aspect of marketers' KPI metrics and Drupal 9 offers a single view of your web activity by integrating with any external analytical tool. If you're an e-commerce site, delivering content-driven e-commerce experiences by seamlessly integrating with platforms like Elastic Path, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce has never been easier. And lastly, you don't have to be an HTML or JavaScript whiz to work on Drupal. It offers enhanced content authoring capabilities. Now that information is great from a marketers' perspective, but how will Drupal 9 benefit your IT team? Well, with enhanced performance, a cleaner code base, and a continuous innovation cycle to look forward to, there's a lot to love for technical users as well. Here are just a few examples. Performance. Drupal 9 promises enhanced performance through an improved caching mechanism, big pipe, page caching, block caching, and views caching available by default in its core. The backend CMS user interface. This improved UI and admin navigation system in Drupal 9 allows for the management of content, taxonomy, users, blocks, and themes with a mobile first approach, providing the ability to manage updates to your CMS on the go. An optimized code structure. As opposed to the require statement in Drupal 7, in Drupal 9, the autoload feature defaults is at the core, which allows modules to inherit the dependencies which will be loaded only when required. A custom feature development. This creates custom features using widgets becomes, it just becomes so much simpler in Drupal 9 by using several existing modules and creating a block plugin to integrate the widget instead of using third-party modules. A built-in JSON API which provides seamless integration with CRM, CDP, ERP, and allows for considerable savings and secured integration. And lastly, coding best practices. Your code base is going to be cleaner with a better templating process using the twig template engine, which doesn't allow PHP or other code in theme templates. Again, Drupal 9 will absolutely benefit marketers and IT, as well as create a better user experience. But if you still have questions on why Drupal is a leading CMS, the benefits on migrating to version 9, or how that process could be executed, Kat will definitely have the answers in these next slides. Kat. Thanks, Jim. So in the coming months, Drupal users still on D7 will need to make the decision whether to upgrade to D9 or switch to another CMS altogether. So you have three options. Traditional CMS tools like Adobe may offer things like enterprise functionality, security, and scalability that IT needs, but they are notoriously hard to use, slow to market, and tend to be more expensive as they are often reliant on developers. On the other hand, consumer site building tools are really intuitive and easy for marketers to use. Marketing leaders need to move fast and they're tired of waiting on IT. However, they do not scale, have limited functionality, and they are a liability when it comes to enterprise security and governance. Then there is basic hosting and custom development, which could lead you to exactly what you want, the customizability and connectivity you need to deliver content on all channels and integrate with their existing systems. However, they come at high costs and knowledge to maintain and update post launch, not to mention the slow speed to market, lack of ease of use, and they have difficulty adapting to market forces. Luckily, Drupal is the best of all three. It's easy to use, can be customized to your organization's specific needs and preferences, all while maintaining enterprise functionality and governance. So why migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9? Well Drupal 8 significantly changed the way content and configuration is stored in the database. Because of this, an update can't simply be applied to an existing Drupal 7 site. Instead, the content and configuration data from the Drupal 7 site must be migrated to a new Drupal 9 site. Furthermore, not all contributed models have automatic upgrade paths. This may require a manual or custom migration. Drupal 9 significantly changed how themes are structured. These changes can't be migrated. Instead, a theme must be rebuilt to work in Drupal 9. One option to manage these migrations would be to utilize an automated tooling that assists with the D7 to D9 migration, such as Acquia's Migrate Accelerating. Acquia Migrate Accelerating is a feature of Acquia's Drupal Cloud. Acquia Drupal Cloud being a platform which offers content management with unmatched ease of use, flexibility, and the only highly scalable, secure, and fully managed cloud platform optimized for Drupal. AMI is the only tool available for accelerating D7 to D9 migrations and is included with every Acquia Cloud subscription. Ultimately, speeding up migrations by 50% for all sites and 80% for sites with minimal code. AMI is best for customers if you are migrating a single site or one site within a multi-site configuration. You are utilizing the top-contrib modules. AMI will be able to generate recommendations on the best practices for migrating those to D9. You have a more complex data model. AMI will give racks on how to migrate your code so you do not need to go through line by line yourself. And you are simply performing a lift and shift migration rather than completely recreating your site on D9. Now, while AMI is an amazing tool to assist with migrations, we are aware there are times when your migration may just not be that simple. Luckily, that's where Acquia's amazing partners such as WDB come in. As Kat just mentioned, Acquia's AMI is a wonderful tool to assist in the migration from Drupal 7 sites. But for more enterprise-level projects, working with a firm that specializes in Drupal will be needed. This is where WDB can help. As one of the country's premier website design and digital marketing firms, we can partner with your team to not only manage the entire migration process, but redesign and enhance your digital presence. The first step would be to conduct an audit as you need to know where you are now before setting a strategic path for the future. A great example of a highly successful migration is Whitehead Institute, who partnered with WDB last year. I'm going to now hand the presentation over to Gil so he can go over this case study in greater detail. Thank you very much, Jim. Whitehead Institute of MIT is a word renowned biomedical research organization dedicated to improving human health. Explaining the value of science to the public, however, has been a long-standing challenge. The outgoing website needed to fundamentally change in order to serve its purpose as an educational tool to grow its community and influence for greater scientific exploration and impact. Drupal 7 templating engine, for example, provided only few layouts and modules to generate content. The marketing team, as a result, was struggling with limited publishing capabilities. Our process began with website audits focusing on user journey, user experience and overall content. The goal was to better understand the target audience and things they cared most about. This approach helped us create a sitemap and prioritize content for those individuals. To address the biggest challenge for Whitehead marketing team, WDB engineering and design group architected the new website as a modular platform. Whitehead Institute team can utilize those modules to create any given page without limiting their creative vision. The content on each page becomes rich with interactions and CTAs. The content you see in the video was built by modular blocks that can be placed in any order on any page. As a result of this migration, organic traffic has increased by 138%. The time on the site increased from 40 seconds to over 3 minutes, and page depth increased from 1 to 4 pages. In the end, we have a better digital experience, but also a user experience that enhances your ROI. So to recap on everything that we've discussed today, today's digital landscape is ever-evolving and creating the right content on the right CMS is vital for a positive user experience. Drupal 7 has an end of life of November 2022, but there are options. Drupal 9 is built for marketers' needs as well as offering numerous benefits to your IT teams. As scary as a migration process might sound, partnering with Drupal experts like WDB and Acquia will allow for a seamless transition, as well as a refreshed digital presence when it comes to the look and usability of your site. Drupal 9 Audit can set the stage for a successful digital strategy for 2022 and beyond. With that, I'd like to open up things for any questions that you may have for our speakers. In looking at some of the questions that have come in during the presentation, the first one that I'd like to bring up, and Gil and Kat, you both might be able to kind of tag team this one. The question is, our current site is not on Acquia. What does that process look like when making a hosting transition? I can probably take that question. Acquia is a platform that essentially built for a user thinking engineer. It's really made to help the engineering teams and marketing teams come together. However, that often is different from some of the platforms that the organizations might be using. They might be using AWS on their own as a platform. They might be using some other platforms like SiteGround or some might even use GoDaddy or similar services as well. The transition takes a little bit of time to set up, configure and make it work. But it's definitely worth the time and the investment because the tool becomes a lot more flexible and gives the organization more power to maintain properly and support their code base. And correct me if I'm wrong, Kat, but the extended support that you had spoken to earlier is only offered if you are being hosted on Acquia. Is that correct? That's correct. It is a Drupal community offering, but only certain vendors are participating in it. And Acquia is one of the only hosting providers that is currently providing Drupal 7 extended support at this time. Here's another question. And Gila, I have a feeling this might be playing off of the case study that you had presented. Is there an average timeline for a D7 to D9 migration? It really all depends on the size of the website. Some of the organizations we work with have smaller web presence. Others have thousands and thousands of pages. In case of the Whitehead Institute, they are close to about 3,500 various pages that were within various content buckets. The process of understanding their customers and target audience going through and audit, redesign, and then actual implementation in total took about nine months. Gotcha. So that's about 3,500 pages, an enterprise level account. It took about nine months. So with the impending end of life being November of 2022, which is 11 months away. Again, enterprise level accounts or just any D7 account, if you're looking to migrate before that timeline, if you're not going to have any extended service. Now is the time to begin that process or start really implementing or thinking about that strategy, especially if it could take six to nine months depending on the size of your website. So another question that came in, I'm going to direct this one to Kat. How would I know if our site would be suitable for AMA or if I would need to work with a digital firm like WDB? Great. So usually I would say if you have a more complex data model, you know, not anything too simple, I would go for AMA, but as soon as it gets to more enterprise level and custom configurations. Then I would say definitely partner with someone like WDB. It's just because AMA is really to be used as a tool to help you in your migration. It will be able to give you tips and recommendations and help you track your progress. But they hands on assistance that a partner like WDB is able to provide is truly invaluable as well. And the other advantage too is like we said, if you're on Drupal 7, the chances are that your site might have kind of the look and feel might have been created three to five years ago just with a like when Drupal 7 was kind of created. So it's probably time like we talked about earlier in regards to content to get a new look and feel. Look at the speed, look at the layout, the user interaction. So working with someone like WDB who can kind of help reformat and refresh and redesign the website. Kind of the face of it is vital as well. So I appreciate that. And one more and maybe both of you or Kat, I know you mentioned this as well in your graph with Drupal 10 being launched in mid 2022. What new features will be available? So Drupal 10 is really going to just be a refined version of Drupal 9. The continuous iterations are just going to, you know, just get better and better of how Drupal 9 is able to be used. There are going to be some third party updates. For example, like CK Editor 4 is going to be updated to CK Editor 5. Symphony 4 is going to be updated to Symphony 5 and 6. Composer 1 is going to be updated to Composer 2 and PHP 7 will be moved to PHP 8. Just a suggestion though, I would not recommend waiting until Drupal 10 is out before you start your migration. Just because while most of your contributed modules are going to be available on Drupal 9, they just might not be available right when Drupal 10 comes out. So it's better to migrate over to Drupal 9 now and then just have the easy upgrade once Drupal 10 comes out later in the year. And isn't it correct that if you are on Drupal 7, you have to migrate to Drupal 9 before 10? There's no Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 migration? I believe you can move directly from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, but it's not recommended. It's definitely an easier process and better for customers if they do. It's a better user experience and with the timelines, it's just an easier migration. Yes, we definitely. Awesome. Okay. Well, last question. It's, they said, I'm interested in learning more about an audit and potential migration. What would be the next best step? Gil, I don't know if you'd like to take that one. I think the logical next step would be to essentially reach out to an organization similar to WDB and begin with an audit to get a better understanding of the code base, the various integrations, integration, third-party platforms that currently exist on the site, really get a better understanding of where the website is at this point. Because in the past couple of years, due to the pandemic, so much has changed and so many things been likely added to the site that weren't necessarily planned at the beginning. And essentially, all those things need to be taken into consideration, understanding the traffic, where the traffic is going, what pages are more visible to users, which pages are necessarily there that potentially might need to go away within a new iteration of the site. All those things need to be done before you can actually jump into the migration process to really make an impact. Wonderful. No, I appreciate that, Gil. And I agree. Being able to go on our website, there's a contact us. You can get more information and schedule a free consultation because like I had said previously, you kind of have to know where you are now before you can start strategizing and planning for the future. And then once we're able to do that consultation and kind of build that roadmap, that's where we can bring in our trusted partners like Acquia to work as a team to give you the best experience possible for your migration. But in the end, the best user experience for everyone you're trying to reach with your digital presence. So with that, that concludes today's webinar on Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migration. I'd like to thank both Gil and Kat for offering their expertise as well as for WDB and Acquia for putting on this informative webinar. Lastly, a big thank you to everyone that was able to attend today. We truly look forward to partnering on your future future Drupal projects. With that, I'd like to say thanks everyone. Have a great day.