Modernising a four-site heritage ecosystem from Drupal 5 to Drupal 11, behind a hardened security layer

The challenge

Four production sites serving a global community were running on Drupal 5, more than a decade past end-of-life: unpatched, hard to maintain and increasingly targeted by abusive automated traffic, including AI-training scrapers. The estate also carried legacy credentials and backend access paths that bypassed the public gateway. The sites had to be upgraded and secured without interrupting service, losing search rankings or breaking the mobile applications that depend on their APIs.

What we delivered

• Redeveloped and migrated the full ecosystem — ismaili.net, library.ismaili.net, heritage.ismaili.net and forum.ismaili.net — from Drupal 5 to the latest Drupal 11, preserving content, URLs and search equity.
• Architected and deployed a proof-of-work anti-DDoS and anti-scraper defence layer across all four production sites via a hardened Apache reverse-proxy chain.
• Tuned bot-mitigation policies to balance robust security with business continuity: search-engine crawlers and the live mobile-app API integrations were preserved while abusive automated AI-training scrapers were blocked.
• Hardened SSH and identity management across the estate — enforced Ed25519 key authentication, least-privilege sudo and revocation of legacy credentials — eliminating backend gateway-bypass exposure.
• Executed zero-downtime production cutovers using full pre-change backups, health-checked deployments and automated rollbacks.
• Delivered complete architecture and runbook documentation for the client’s ongoing operation of the platform.

Outcomes

Platform

Drupal 5 → Drupal 11

Sites secured

4 production sites

Downtime at cutover

Zero

Gateway-bypass exposure

Eliminated

SEO & mobile APIs

Preserved

Handover

Architecture + runbooks