Dylan Lalonde

Texas State Library & Archives Commission — Drupal 7 to 10 Rebuild

Drupal 10 PHP MySQL Apache Twig Red Hat Linux USWDS

The largest and most complex project of my career. The Texas State Library & Archives Commission's primary public website had run on Drupal 7 for over a decade — ~275,000 monthly unique visitors, 200+ staff whose work fed into the site, ~30 internal contributors with direct content access, 10,000+ content nodes (pages), 20,000+ files, and millions of archival database records. It was simultaneously a high-traffic public resource and the operational nexus for the organization's internal workflows. With Drupal 7 reaching end-of-life in January 2025 and becoming a security liability, I was brought on to lead the rebuild in Drupal 10 before that hard deadline.

Drupal 7 to 10 has no direct upgrade path — it's a complete rebuild from scratch. I recreated all content types modelled on the existing architecture, then ran iterative Drush migration scripts to transform and move thousands of pages and files from Drupal 7's content structure into the newly rebuilt Drupal 10 architecture, with zero data loss and full functionality preserved. I then re-templated the entire site in Twig to conform to the USWDS federal design system across all browsers and device sizes, and built a custom module giving staff searchable access to tens of thousands of previously unindexed server files.

Highlights

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