Community support for Drupal 7 ended on January 5, 2025. Activity in the Drupal #migrate Slack channel shows that many are actively rebuilding their sites in Drupal 10 (or 11). Two of Digital World Biology’s Drupal 7 sites—Biotech-Careers.org and InnovATEBIO.org—have been rebuilt in Drupal 10. Biotech-Careers.org (BTC) was the first to be completed, taking approximately 10 months when accounting for migration, site building, and custom theme development. The next site, InnovATEBIO.org, took just over four months.
InnovATEBIO.org supports a national network of community college and high school biotechnology education programs. Compared to BTC, InnovATEBIO.org is significantly more complex, with over 1,400 user accounts and 20 content types (including Books). Legacy code from Drupal 6 and 7, as well as “non-ideal” implementations (Node Auto Translate [NAT]) and field collection data required new strategies such as the use of Storage Entities. Despite this complexity, and using the same resources as the BTC rebuild, the InnovATEBIO.org project was completed in less than half the time. And, new capabilities were added that do not yet exist in BTC.
Part of the time reduction was due to the experience gained from rebuilding BTC and theming with Twig and Tailwind. A larger factor was the availability of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. Using only the free version, ChatGPT helped solve challenges involving SQL updates to the D7 database (e.g., migrating private to public data, refactoring NAT content), preprocessing theme functions, and creating new modules for custom Twig filters and keyword highlighting in views exposed filter search content. Additionally, JavaScript was added to “pin” clicked menu and select list items to the relevant content being viewed, enhancing usability.
These projects illustrate how experienced site builders can accelerate complex rebuilds by combining modern Drupal tools with AI-assisted development—pushing the boundaries of what’s possible without writing everything from scratch.
