Behind NASA’s Web Evolution: WordPress, Block Editing, and the Solar Eclipse Traffic Surge
Lone Rock Point’s Stacy Holtz and Gary Kovar joined Birgit Pauli-Haack on episode 100 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. The duo discussed NASA’s migration from Drupal 7 to WordPress and the block based editor. Migrating content from Drupal 7 to WordPress is no easy task, especially for an organization as large as NASA. Gary Kovar describes what was involved with the migration.
The project involved moving a website’s content to a new design system, while also handling older designs that weren’t migrated before. Some smaller sites with 10-15 pages didn’t fit into existing design patterns, but they still contained important information for the public. Andrew Norcross led the migration, which wasn’t as simple as copying content over. They also had to rethink navigation and how the information was structured because different people had been in charge of different content, leading to outdated or conflicting information.
The migration happened in two phases. First, content was moved to a staging area, where editors could start converting it to new block formats. After this, they could add custom blocks and figure out where the content fit in the new system. URLs also had to be handled, as some were combined, changed, or no longer existed, requiring redirects for old links.
At Lone Rock Point, we onboard new users to WordPress with a number of educational resources, as explained by Stacy Holtz.
In the beginning, we set up a sandbox for content creators to practice using the new block features as they were released. We were learning alongside them because we couldn’t just look up how to use the new custom blocks. We worked closely with the developers to figure out all the new features. We started with small groups of content creators, trained them, and then they helped teach their own teams. This way, we didn’t have to train everyone all at once, and we gradually helped everyone get comfortable with the new system.
Some people say WordPress isn’t ready for large-scale or enterprise use, but that’s just not true. NASA running on WordPress is proof that the platform can scale as necessary to support the needs of large organizations. Earlier this year during the Solar Eclipse, between a four and a half hour span, there were one billion requests made to the NASA.gov website, with a large majority served under 400 milliseconds. The site remained performant for the duration of the event.
If we accomplished this for NASA, imagine what we can do for your organization. Contact Lone Rock Point today to see how we can be of service to you.
