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Our long-term client - Alutech United Inc - came to us with an inquiry to migrate their Drupal 7 website to Drupal 8 within the shortest period possible. No design changes were needed. As the most advantageous solution, we offered to migrate the existing Drupal 7 website into the Drupal 8 multisite system. 

About the project

Multisite is a system of sites that have one shared codebase and one core. The sites are placed in the sub-catalogs of this codebase and they have the same structure. You can modify it but these changes will appear throughout all the websites in this system. 

In this project, there were many pre-configured features and that significantly simplified the development process:

  • the old website’s content fitted the structure of the multisite perfectly.
  • we reused the products’ teasers and product description pages;
  • we reused contact forms;
  • we implemented the feature "Find a Dealer" which existed in the multisite system but was absent on the old website.

 
Although the websites in the multisite system should adhere to the shared structure, there are several things that can be customized:

  • theme colors;
  • pictures in a slider, on pages;
  • products and content on the website.

When it comes to migration to Drupal 8, we had the existing Drupal 7 website and the existing structure of a Drupal 8 website in the multisite. What was left to do is the content migration to Drupal 8 with some minor changes in the site structure.

In the end, our client spends less time on security updates: the shared codebase for all the websites allows us to apply the updates one time instead of four times (four is a number of websites in this multisite system). This is one of the benefits of migration to Drupal 8.

Why Drupal was chosen

Our client has already been using the Drupal multisite system for other projects, so the choice was predefined - Drupal 8. 

ADCI Solutions suggests building the multisite system if your client has:

  • websites with similar features, layouts or even with similar content (online stores for different cities) 
  • budget constraints and time constraints - but only if the condition above is valid
     

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: