WASHINGTON, DC – In September 2021, the National Archives (NARA) awarded Agileana a digital services blanket purchase agreement (BPA). Then, in September 2022, NARA awarded Agileana a task order against that BPA to migrate the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Museum website from Drupal version 7 to Drupal version 9.
Drupal is a content management system (CMS) that provides the features and functionality to allow people to manage content on their website without technical skills. Drupal is the CMS of choice for thirteen of the fifteen departments within the executive branch of the United States and also the preferred CMS platform of the National Archives.
Drupal was initially released in 2001 by it’s original author, Dries Buytaert. Drupal 7 was released on January 5, 2011 and Drupal 7’s end-of-life is in November 2023. Drupal 8 and beyond represents a radical departure from the procedural language predecessor. Drupal 8, 9, and 10 are based on the object-oriented programming language called Symfony, which was built on top of PHP. Future versions of Drupal rely on Symfony’s high performance PHP framework, which is a set of reusable PHP component libraries.
The goals of the NARA BPA task order are to get the Obama Library out of Drupal 7 and to integrate new features such as the Gutenberg editor interface, reusable Gutenberg blocks, update the front-end to comply with Drupal 9, develop a new virtual reading room (digital research room), build and configure a global site search based on ElasticSearch, and conduct user acceptance testing (UAT) prior to re-launch.
