Enterprise CMS Modernization for a Global Food Manufacturer

Problem Description

A global leader in beef production needed to modernize their content management system by migrating a large-scale legacy WordPress platform into Drupal 8. The WordPress system contained inconsistent content structures, custom post types, and years of legacy data across multiple business units and brands. Editorial teams struggled with content reuse, governance, and long-term scalability.

The client needed a flexible, future-ready Drupal solution, and wanted to determine which content should be retained, transformed, or deprecated. Templates had to be rebuilt, users migrated, and infrastructure re-architected.

Stakeholders

• Marketing & Editorial Teams – Needed structured content types and better editorial workflow

• IT & DevOps – Responsible for long-term security, performance, and deployment

• Leadership – Focused on reducing platform fragmentation and vendor lock-in

• External Drupal Dev Team – In charge of final Drupal site build

• Project Manager / PMO – Oversaw timeline and business requirements

Business Value

• Replaced aging and inconsistent WordPress stack with a centralized, structured Drupal 8 platform

• Reduced manual maintenance and plugin-related risks

• Enabled cleaner editorial workflows and easier onboarding of new teams

• Created a data model and infrastructure that scaled with future multi-brand needs

• Set foundation for future multilingual, headless, or decoupled frontend expansion

Commercial Impact

• Saved time by reducing manual content entry through automated data migration

• Decreased dependency on outdated plugins and themes

• Improved performance, SEO, and site security through a modern architecture

• Reduced long-term maintenance costs and centralized hosting strategy

• Enhanced collaboration between development and content teams

My Role

As the technical lead and solutions engineer, I:

• Audited and mapped all WordPress content structures to Drupal 8 entity types

• Identified transferable data vs. content requiring transformation or deprecation

• Designed a custom migration plan using a hybrid of:

  • Drupal’s Migrate API

  • Custom PHP scripts to normalize and clean WordPress data

• Partnered on infrastructure strategy, helping move from legacy hosting to a modern cloud environment

• Created documentation, rollout plans, and data validation scripts

Key Challenges & How We Solved Them

• Challenge: Inconsistent and messy legacy data in WordPress
  Solution: Developed custom PHP scripts to extract, clean, and normalize the data before migrating it into structured Drupal 8 entities.

• Challenge: Multiple custom post types, taxonomies, and metadata
  Solution: Mapped all custom post types to Drupal 8 content types and reused taxonomy vocabularies wherever possible for consistency.

• Challenge: Unclear what content could or should be migrated
  Solution: Conducted a full content audit with stakeholders to determine which data should be migrated, archived, or transformed.

• Challenge: WordPress plugins with embedded functionality
  Solution: Rebuilt necessary functionality in Drupal using core configuration, contributed modules, and custom blocks.

• Challenge: Broken media links and mismatched file paths
  Solution: Created a media mapping process to remap files, validate URLs, and fix or redirect broken assets during migration.

• Challenge: Performance issues with large-scale data import
  Solution: Used Drupal Migrate API with batching and dry-run testing to ensure reliable and performant migration of content.

• Challenge: Outdated, inflexible hosting infrastructure
  Solution: Proposed a modern cloud-based architecture (e.g., AWS, Acquia, Pantheon) with high availability and scalability.

• Challenge: No migration rollback or validation plan
  Solution: Implemented a staging environment, repeatable migration scripts, and automated QA checks to safely test and iterate.