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RICOH
Future-proofing a mission-critical platform with stronger performance, security, and scalability
Overview
Ricoh USA partnered with OPTASY to upgrade the Ricoh Developer Program (RiDP) website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11. The goal was to modernize the platform for long-term sustainability, enhance security and performance, and improve usability for developers and administrators while replicating the familiar design and user experience that members rely on.
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About
Ricoh USA, Inc. is the North American headquarters of the global Ricoh Group, a leader in digital services, workplace technologies, and IT solutions. Headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, Ricoh USA supports organizations across healthcare, education, government, finance, and manufacturing with tailored solutions to help them work smarter and more securely.
Among its many services, Ricoh operates the Ricoh Developer Program (RiDP), a comprehensive platform supporting Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in integrating their solutions with Ricoh, Lanier, and Savin hardware and software. With a five-tier membership model, RiDP provides development tools, technical support, training, and marketing resources to help developers bring their products to market quickly and seamlessly.
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Goals & Challenges
Ricoh USA needed to:
- Upgrade the RiDP website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 for long-term support and sustainability
- Improve security compliance, including compatibility with PHP 8.x+
- Preserve the existing design and user experience while modernizing the infrastructure
- Enhance site performance and scalability with a future-ready framework
- Improve editorial efficiency with a more intuitive content model and administrative workflows
- Add enhanced functionalities
Key challenges included:
- Ensuring a smooth migration without downtime or business disruption
- Preserving SEO value, URLs, media, and entity references with zero content loss
- Migrating from Organic Groups to the modern Group model with new roles and access management
- Rebuilding the theme to align with Drupal 11’s Twig-based framework and Single Directory Components
- Improving discoverability and search for documentation and tickets
- Enhancing the WYSIWYG editor for better usability, including code snippet support
- Ensuring full responsiveness and accessibility across devices (WCAG 2.1 AA compliance)
Solutions
OPTASY followed a discovery-first approach, auditing the Drupal 7 site and creating a roadmap for a seamless upgrade.
Key solutions included:
- Discovery & Audit: Assessed all content types, taxonomies, modules, and custom code to identify requirements and eliminate redundancies.
- Automated Migration Pipeline: Used Drupal’s Migrate API with custom plugins to migrate nodes, terms, users, comments, and files—ensuring clean HTML, media handling, and 301 redirects for SEO preservation.
- Code Modernization: Refactored legacy custom modules to Drupal 11 standards, adopting dependency injection, PSR-4 autoloading, typed APIs, PHPUnit testing, and compatibility with PHP 8.2/8.3.
- Theme & Front-End Rebuild: Implemented Single Directory Components for a scalable, component-driven design system with responsive BEM/SCSS, WebP images, and lazy-loading for performance.
- Performance & Security: Composer-managed builds, CI/CD pipelines, cache optimization with BigPipe/CDN/Varnish.
The Results
The Drupal 11 upgrade delivered significant benefits to Ricoh USA:
- Enhanced security, performance, and compliance with modern web standards
- A future-proof platform with long-term Drupal 11 support
- Seamless migration with zero content loss and full SEO preservation
- 40% improvement in overall site performance through caching, optimized images, and modernized code
- Accessible, mobile-first design meeting WCAG AA standards
- Improved developer and administrator productivity.
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