Case Study: Drupal 6 Migration

PlanningPlanet
Drupal 6 to 10 Migration

Professional community platform for Project Controls migrated with 20+ content types and 15+ years of forum discussions

Global Project Controls Community

PlanningPlanet.com is a professional community platform dedicated to Project Controls, serving thousands of practitioners worldwide with forums, wiki documentation, job listings, newsletters, and professional certification programs.

Drupal 6 to Drupal 10 Migration

CodeLift executed a comprehensive multi-stage migration from Drupal 6 through Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, preserving 20+ content types, user profiles, forum discussions, wiki hierarchies, and newsletter subscriptions spanning over 15 years of community contributions.

PlanningPlanet Case Study - Before and After Migration
Client Testimonial

The migration of PlanningPlanet from Drupal 6 to Drupal 10 was a massive undertaking given the complexity of our community platform. CodeLift handled the intricate data relationships, forum threading, wiki hierarchies, and user profiles with exceptional care. Our community members can now enjoy a modern, secure platform while retaining access to over 15 years of professional discussions and resources.

PlanningPlanet Community Administrator

Migration Approach

Multi-Stage Migration Pipeline

A staged pipeline approach was implemented to migrate from Drupal 6 through intermediate versions to Drupal 10. Each stage allowed for data integrity verification, cleanup, and validation before proceeding.

Complex Data Migration

Custom development was required to migrate complex data relationships. Forum threading hierarchies, user relationships, geolocation data, and navigation structures all required specialized handling.

Wiki Book Hierarchy Migration

Special migration handling preserved the complete parent-child page relationships, navigation order, and collapsible tree structures that community members rely on for professional knowledge access.

AI-Assisted Development

AI-powered tools accelerated the development of migration scripts, data finalizers, and frontend components. Claude Code assisted with complex database queries and PHP class generation.

Forum Thread Preservation

A specialized ForumCommentFinalizer preserved the complete comment threading hierarchy, maintaining parent-child relationships, timestamps, and user attributions across 15+ years of discussions.

Modern Security Stack

The upgraded platform includes reCAPTCHA v3 protection, Mailgun email integration, Redis caching, and all current Drupal security patches, protecting the community from spam.

A Modern Community Platform Built on Solid Foundations

PlanningPlanet now operates on Drupal 10 with a Bootstrap 5 responsive theme, interactive frontpage tabs showing trending discussions, a fully navigable wiki with collapsible book hierarchies, modernized user profiles with rich text editing, and a professional newsletter system via Simplenews and Mailgun. The platform maintains complete backward compatibility with all legacy URLs and preserves the full history of community contributions.

Key metrics

Migration by the Numbers

368

Git commits over 6 months of development

20+

Content types successfully migrated

14

Custom data finalizers built

15+

Years of forum content preserved

Behind the Migration

PlanningPlanet represents one of our most complex migration projects to date. The Drupal 6 platform had accumulated over 15 years of community content with intricate data relationships between forums, wiki pages, user profiles, and professional certifications. We developed a comprehensive monorepo structure with isolated environments that allowed us to validate each migration stage independently. The custom data finalizers we built for forum comments and wiki book hierarchies became reusable components for future projects.

Niels de Feyter

Founder of CodeLift

Ready to modernize your Drupal platform?

Whether you're running Drupal 6, 7, 8, or 9, CodeLift can help you migrate to the latest version with zero data loss.