Migrating the Gorges du Fier website to Drupal 11

The Gorges du Fier, a natural gorge open to visitors in Lovagny, near Annecy, had a Drupal 7 website in service since 2014. I migrated it to Drupal 11, in three languages (French, English, Dutch), without losing a single address.

Taking over the content without inventing anything

The pages, their translations, the gallery, the leaflets and the menus were taken over with the Drupal Migrate API, from the database of the old site. Page addresses are kept exactly as they were, and the 54 redirects inherited from eleven years of the site now lead straight to the right page, in a single hop.

A lightweight theme, with no build chain

The theme carries the identity of the site in native CSS, with colour tokens whose contrast is checked by tests, self-hosted fonts and no compilation tool. Pages are built from reusable blocks (text and image, gallery, video, map, quote).

What the operator manages on their own

• prices, opening hours and season dates, entered once and displayed everywhere, in all three languages;
• scheduled alert messages, for an exceptional closure for instance;
• a contact form protected against bots, whose emails carry the identity of the site.

A switchover without downtime

The new site ran for several days on a non-indexed staging address before the domain name was switched on 5 October 2026. The same day, the certificate, the redirects, the sitemap and the language tags were checked on the public domain.