Web Development & Public Sector 2022-2026

Institut de Cultura de Barcelona

Fifteen websites across the barcelona.cat ecosystem in Drupal: the city's festivals, its museums and its participation bodies, with a migration to Drupal 10, three languages per site and communication teams publishing on their own.

4 years 6 especialistas 2022-2026 barcelona.cat

Services

Drupal Development
Migration to Drupal 10
Ongoing Maintenance
Web Accessibility
Content Management
Editor Training

Related services

01The challenge

The Institut de Cultura de Barcelona doesn't have a website, it has an ecosystem. The city's festivals (Grec, BCNegra, Festival 42, Barcelona Poesia), its museums (Frederic Marès, Museu d'Història de Barcelona), the municipal programmes and the citizen participation bodies each live in their own Drupal installation inside barcelona.cat, with its own theme, audience and calendar. Running fifteen sites at once means holding the same bar on accessibility, security and multilingual publishing across all of them, without letting any fall behind on versions, while non-technical communication teams publish daily in Catalan, Spanish and English. On top of that sat a platform debt: part of the ecosystem was still on Drupal 7, 8 and 9, with end of support around the corner.

02The solution

We work inside Barcelona City Council's own Drupal platform rather than against it: its corporate profiles and themes (talia, aglaia, minerva) are the base, and on top of them we build the content types, paragraphs and views each venue needs. We migrated the sites from Drupal 7, 8 and 9 to Drupal 10 while preserving content and URLs, and republished 22 virtual exhibitions from the Arxiu Municipal de Barcelona in a new Drupal 10 module. Every site publishes in three languages, with configuration exported to git and deployments through a GitLab pipeline. And we close the loop where public sector projects usually fail: a content manual and hands-on training, so the day to day doesn't depend on us.

Tech stack

How it's built

Front end

Twig Front-end templates
Sass CSS preprocessor

Engine

Drupal 10 Structured CMS
PHP 8.3 Back-end language
GitLab CI/CD Continuous integration
DDEV Development environments

Data

MySQL 8 Database
Redis In-memory cache

03Architecture

How a request flows

Each venue's communication team publishes in the Drupal installation of its own site, using the content types and paragraphs of the council's corporate profile
Every site's configuration travels in git, so a structural change is reviewed and deployed rather than edited by hand in production
The GitLab pipeline carries the change from the local environment (DDEV) to production, with the same recipe for all fifteen sites
Drupal 10 serves the page in the requested language (Catalan, Spanish or English), backed by Redis for repeated queries
The festivals absorb their calendar peaks (programme, tickets, agenda) without touching the platform, because the peak is content, not code

04Measured impact

Results

15 Live websites on barcelona.cat
22 Virtual exhibitions republished
3 Languages per site (ca, es, en)
D7→D10 Platform migration

Verifiable data

Metrics in detail

Live websites in the barcelona.cat ecosystem: 15
Virtual exhibitions from the Arxiu Municipal republished on Drupal 10: 22
Languages published on each site (Catalan, Spanish, English): 3
Years working with the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona: 4

Methodology: Scope figures as of August 2026, verifiable by opening each site on barcelona.cat. Development happens inside Barcelona City Council's own Drupal platform (corporate profiles and themes), not on a platform of ours: what we bring is the development, the migration, the maintenance and the content of each site.

05The process

The process

Inventory

A census of the sites, their Drupal versions, modules and themes before touching anything
Migration

Moving from Drupal 7, 8 and 9 to Drupal 10 while preserving content and URLs
Development

Content types, paragraphs and views built inside the council's corporate themes
Content

Editorial publishing and maintenance in Catalan, Spanish and English
Autonomy

A content manual and training so the communication team publishes without depending on the vendor