sportscotland is the national agency for sport in Scotland. Their vision is an active Scotland where everyone benefits from sport and they do this by investing Scottish Government and National Lottery resources. Their website is a crucial tool for communicating with athletes, coaches, and fans alike. Over time, their website had grown to include four different sites, each with its own codebase, design, and content. With the need to consolidate all four sites into a single up-to-date and secure Umbraco instance, they asked us to perform a technical health check of their codebase to ensure a smooth transition.
Umbraco code review
The project began with a thorough review of the currently installed Umbraco packages to check if any third-party packages had an upgrade path. This was important to ensure that the upgraded site would not break any existing functionality or have any compatibility issues.
Next, a full code review was performed to check all bespoke code; checking templates, partials, classes controllers and models to identify any potential technical issues in updating from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 10.
Umbraco database upgrade and migration
In addition to the code review, a full mock database upgrade was performed to identify any issues that could be faced during the migration process. The team wanted to check if content could be automatically migrated without any loss or that it could be manually transferred without any complications.
Umbraco Security review
Finally, a security review was performed, which involved running an automated penetration test and a software composition analysis tool. This was to identify and mitigate any security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious actors.
What we did:
- Reviewed currently installed Umbraco packages to ensure they have an upgrade path.
- Conducted a full code review to check for any technical issues in updating from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 10. We checked templates, partials, classes, controllers, and models.
- Performed a full mock database upgrade to identify any potential issues and to determine if content could be automatically migrated or would require manual migration.
- Conducted a full security review, which included running an automated penetration test and a software composition analysis tool.
All the reviews were performed using a pragmatic agile approach, ensuring that the team could be flexible and adapt to any issues that arose during the process. The result was a successful technical health check of the sportsscotland website codebase, which identified any technical issues that could be addressed during the consolidation process. With the technical health check complete, the team was ready to move forward with the consolidation of the four existing sites into a single Umbraco instance, delivering a more streamlined and secure website for sportscotland.
