Zicasso.com is a luxury travel website that brings the world’s top travel specialists together with travelers who want the vacation of a lifetime. Starting on Drupal 5 in 2008, Zicasso built a sophisticated custom travel matching and planning platform that has no equal. In 2012, with Drupal 5 no longer supported, Zicasso started their plan for a great migration to Drupal 7.
The Challenges
Code - The Drupal 5 codebase had hacks to Drupal core and to many of the contributed/community modules. This prevented an “upgrade” path to Drupal 6 and was one main reason the site stayed on an old version of Drupal 5 for so long. With Drupal 7 mature at this point, it made sense to do a migration from 5 to 7 by building a new site in Drupal 7 and migrating using the migrate and migrate_d2d modules.
Complexity - The Drupal 5 site had a lot of custom code and complex workflows and logic. It was often joked “We have a million and one rules.” It took a lot of meetings and diagrams and documentation to see what Zicasso had developed and how to streamline and improve their processes. This included better tools for the travel agents and for the Zicasso team handling matching and customer support.
Content Strategy - In Drupal 5, many pages were dynamically generated and Zicasso had no control on the content on these pages including meta tags. SEO was a key focus when rearchitecting the site in Drupal 7 to ensure better content control. We built a lot of flexible taxonomy-based landing pages to meet this need.
Data - There were indeed over a million nodes in Drupal 5. 1056184 to be exact. Couple this with over 200 thousand managed files, and this is a lot of data to handle. Heavily testing migration code was key and, with the length of time needed to migrate any given content type (sometimes 2 or 3 days), rollback on the soon-to-be-live-site really couldn’t be an option. Migrations were handled in incremental batches with the final migration happening on the night of the final cutover.
Beautification - The Drupal 5 site had gone through some recent facelifts and looked pretty good for many of the key pages but it still looked a bit outdated compared to the latest photo-heavy designs like airbnb.com and tripadvisor.com. And, the old site wasn’t built for tablets or phones and, with increasing traffic for mobile, a responsive theme was a must for the Drupal 7 redesign. Beyond responsiveness, the new site uses flat design, rich imagery, and parallax for the home page to convey the luxury travel feel.
The Win
After the million node migration, Yuchun Ku, Zicasso’s COO, said “Wooow - the upgrade from D5 to D7 is like changing from a Honda Civic to Tesla! “ The new design, the responsive pages, the streamlined workflows, and enhanced content editing features all made for a big win for the Zicasso team.
About the speaker
Aimee has been in the web world since the 90s working as a web architect and project manager dealing a variety of Enterprise content management systems. She has presented at BADCamps, Stanford camps, SANDCamp, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out her drupal.org page and Hook 42 bio for more info.