Portland JetportHeadless Migration & Site Management

The Portland International Jetport is Maine's largest airport, and for many travelers its website is the first and last thing they experience of the state. I manage and host the current site, a Drupal build on Pantheon, and I'm leading its migration to a headless WordPress platform with a Next.js frontend.

Why Migrate

Drupal has served the site well. But Drupal 10 is reaching end of support, which put another major-version upgrade and the module compatibility work that comes with it on the calendar. With that effort due regardless, it was the right moment to rethink the platform rather than upgrade in place.

The second driver is security. In a headless architecture the CMS is no longer the public website. Visitors reach a statically generated Next.js frontend, while WordPress runs on separate managed hosting behind it, reachable by the frontend and by editors and nothing else. For a site that has to stay up and stay clean, that separation removes an entire class of exposure.

The site is small in content but heavy in traffic, which is exactly the shape a static frontend suits: pages are built once and served from the edge, so a spike in visitors never touches the CMS.

The Migration

This is a migration first: the same site, on a stronger foundation. The content and structure carry over, and the design gets updates where it's due rather than a ground-up redesign. The build is underway. The architecture decisions, what carries over from the Drupal site, and what changes will be documented here as the work ships.

A second phase is planned once the new platform is live: a larger design refresh and AI features built on the headless foundation, which is part of why the migration comes first.

Running the Existing Site

Until the new platform launches, the Drupal site stays in production and I keep it healthy, secure, and current:

• Core and module updates through Composer, with changes reviewed before they reach production.
• Security patching against Drupal security advisories as they're published.
• Pantheon workflow: dev, test, and live environments, deployments, and backups.
• Configuration management so Drupal config and Composer dependencies are tracked and deployments stay predictable.
• Uptime and performance monitoring, and content and page updates as the team's needs change.