DrupalCon Seattle 2019: Upgrading vs. Upcycling - How to stay ahead of the curve

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/dasjo/upgrading-vs-upcycling-how-to-stay-ahead-of-the-curve

A full rebuild of a website can be a time and money consuming process. This session is about exploring different approaches between upgrading and upcycling existing websites.

To keep up with online trends, technical debt, or just to be able to refresh their appearance, websites often get rebuilt between every 3 to 6 years. We have helped helped many clients transition from their legacy web systems onto Drupal 8 but not everyone is ready to do the move all at once.

If you find yourself in the situation of having a well established web system that has seen a few years already, but you aren’t ready to spend the time and money to do a full rebuild, upcycling might be the answer.

Upcycling allows website owners bring improvements to their websites continuously without the need to wait for a full rebuild. It reduces time to market and risk and are able to leverage up-to-date technology by upcycling individual parts of the website.

Upcycling can enable you to:

Get the most out of your existing website infrastructure

Benefit from user experience, design or frontend performance improvements without the need to wait for a big relaunch

Improve the editorial experience

Implement your investments as quickly as possible

Use Drupal 8 features

This incremental approach allows us refresh parts of the existing website and make it ready for a later transition or into an existing website infrastructure or build decoupled parts of it in Drupal 8.

This session is intended especially for those in architect & client-facing roles but basically for anyone who would like to:

Weigh the pros and cons of Upgrading vs. Upcycling

Leverage decoupled technology early on

Improve an existing Drupal 7 site

Migrate to Drupal 8

Improve an existing Drupal 8 site

This session is based upon my previous one at Drupal Europe:
https://www.drupaleurope.org/session/upgrading-vs-upcycling-how-stay-ahead-curve

Slides:
https://speakerdeck.com/dasjo/upgrading-vs-upcycling-how-to-stay-ahead-of-the-curve

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.