Department of State’s (DOS) United States Diplomacy Center (Diplomacy Center) is the nation’s first museum dedicated to telling the story of American diplomacy. In 2019, Async-Nu Microsystems (ASYNC-NU) was contracted to provide managed hosting with additional creative and technical support to ensure the Diplomacy Center’s websites are high quality and secure. This includes operations and maintenance on the Diplomacy Center’s main web presence (https://diplomacy.state.gov) and their in-museum mobile site (Museum of American Diplomacy Eye (MADI), https://madi.state.gov), backend and frontend development, and content creation. 

Objectives
Drupal™ 8 was a very popular Content Management System (CMS) and it’s End-of-Life (EOL) was on November 2, 2021. With the announcement of Drupal™ 8 EOL, all Drupal™ 8 websites were required to be rebuilt/upgraded to Drupal™ 9 (or another CMS). The DOS’ Diplomacy Center’s MADI website was built on Drupal™ 8 and needed to be migrated to Drupal™ 9 before November 2, 2021. When official support for Drupal™ 8 ran out in November 2021, security updates, bug fixes, and creating new modules for those versions also went away. Websites still running Drupal™ 8 would be vulnerable to cyber-attacks, potential downtime, and a lack of up-to-date features that website owners would expect from their web presence. 

Solution
On March 22, 2021, ASYNC-NU began the 6-month-long project of upgrading the https://madi.state.gov mobile site to Drupal™ 9. ASYNC-NU was responsible for backing up and maintaining the current Drupal™ 8 version of MADI, while also developing and testing the Drupal™ 9 version of the website. ASYNC-NU was also responsible for developing the Drupal™ 9 upgrade Test Plan, planning for all costs applicable to the upgrade approach and project timeline, configuring multiple website environments (Development, Test, and Production) on Pantheon’s hosting platform, as well as overseeing the updating of the website’s DNS records. 

Results 

Result 1: ASYNC-NU successfully upgraded https://madi.state.gov to Drupal™ 9 before November 2, 2021. 

Result 2: ASYNC-NU reduced https://madi.state.gov vulnerability to cyber-attacks and downtime while maintaining its accessibility to the cutting-edge new features of Drupal™ 9. 

Result 3: Upgrading the MADI website to Drupal™ 9 made it more usable, accessible, inclusive, flexible, and scalable. 

At a Glance 

Challenges 

• Drupal™ 8 EOL  

• Website Downtime 

• Budget 

Results 

• Improved Usability, Accessibility, Inclusiveness, Flexibility, and Scalability. 

• Continuous accessibility to cutting-edge features 

• Reduced vulnerability to cyber-attacks