What a Drupal partner covers across the platform lifecycle
A Drupal partner covers four phases in sequence: architecture and platform decisions, build and evolutive development, version upgrades and migrations, and ongoing maintenance. The same team can carry the platform through all four, instead of a separate supplier per phase.
Advice is separable from delivery. Metadrop reviews architecture and platform decisions even when another supplier writes the code. Three engagement models combine freely rather than competing: a dedicated core team on a monthly retainer, strategic projects at a fixed price, and agile evolution on prepaid hours.
Maintenance is preventive, corrective and evolutive, covering security and core updates, incident resolution under agreed response terms, and planned feature work. A version upgrade is scoped as its own project, deliberately excluded from every maintenance plan, and timed against the security-support end date of the Drupal branch in use. An audit is a timeboxed point-in-time review, and the ongoing consultancy loop that can follow it is contracted separately, so a review is never open-ended.
Metadrop has been building Drupal platforms for 15+ years and is a Drupal Association Silver Certified Partner.
A global industrial manufacturer's corporate platform was migrated from Drupal 7 to 9, then progressively upgraded through Drupal 10 and 11 across several years, with maintenance, new feature development and accessibility remediation delivered by the same team throughout (2022 to present).
A multinational home-appliances and HVAC manufacturer's European platform was taken over from a previous provider, stabilized, rebuilt as a multisite architecture, and upgraded from Drupal 10 to 11. It now runs preventive maintenance and evolutive development under one team.
Where to go next in the Drupal lifecycle
Each route below is a full service page with its own scope, deliverables and engagement terms, so start from the one that matches the decision in front of you. Readers arriving with no decision made yet normally start with consulting or an audit, while readers with a deadline normally start with upgrade or Drupal 7 migration.
They've Trusted Metadrop
From manufacturing and energy to public administrations and international NGOs, organizations across Europe and beyond have relied on Metadrop for Drupal platforms in 50+ countries and 30+ languages.
Drupal solutions we build most often
Four platform patterns account for most Drupal work Metadrop is brought in for, and each one carries its own architecture trade-offs.
- Drupal multisite: many brand, regional or departmental sites sharing one Drupal core and configuration, so a new site does not mean a new platform to maintain.
- Headless and decoupled Drupal: Drupal as the content back end behind a JavaScript front end, chosen when the front-end experience genuinely needs it rather than by default.
- Enterprise intranets: internal platforms behind SSO, where role-based access to content and an audit trail over who changed what carry more weight than page count.
- Drupal commerce: catalogue, checkout and subscriptions on Drupal, including the European payment methods an EU merchant needs.
Editorial teams can retain a visual page-building experience in each of these patterns, including decoupled setups where visual preview is often lost.
A multinational appliances manufacturer's platform serves 3 brand sites, with more being added, in 5 languages, combining symmetric and asymmetric translation strategies on one Drupal base.
A rights-management confederation consolidated 7 previously separate websites onto a single Drupal base in 2 languages, and an energy-sector multinational's platform spans 6 sites in 2 languages sharing one technical base. Another energy-sector platform that started as headless Drupal 9 was rebuilt as a coupled Drupal 9 architecture, which gave Metadrop direct experience of both sides of the decoupled decision, including the reasons a client moves back.
Metadrop publishes technical writing on headless Drupal and JavaScript applications, and maintains the official Drupal Form API documentation guide on drupal.org.
When Metadrop is the right fit
The fit is closest when a platform is business-critical: multilingual, multi-site, high-traffic, integrated with a CRM or ERP, and answerable to GDPR, WCAG or NIS2 obligations. Three situations come up most often.
An in-house team that needs reinforcement. Metadrop joins as a full team or as individual Drupal specialists working inside the client's own process, with a say in the technical decisions rather than tickets only.
An inherited or under-maintained platform. Takeover work starts by documenting what exists and stabilizing it, before any roadmap is agreed.
A digital agency subcontracting Drupal engineering. Metadrop works as the Drupal technical backbone behind an agency that owns the client relationship, described in more detail on the Drupal partnership for agencies page.
In all three, scope is defined before it is estimated: work is broken into planned increments with the drivers of the estimate written down, which is what makes a figure reviewable later. Metadrop is generally not the best fit for **brochure sites with no integrations,
Public-sector engagements include a municipal government multisite covering the main portal, dependent-body portals, microsites and an intranet; a regional government's transparency and public-information portal migrated from a legacy platform; a regional ombudsman institution's site upgraded from Drupal 9 to 10; and a regional government's main portal plus a hospital-network multisite audited, developed and maintained over several years.
One engagement runs as Drupal technical partner alongside a separate creative agency holding the primary client contract, with Metadrop as the long-term Drupal technical backbone.
Drupal specialists, certifications and compliance
Metadrop's Drupal specialists work as one team in Spain, inside EU jurisdiction, on one working calendar and timezone, which supports contractual response and resolution targets.
The company is a Drupal Association Silver Certified Partner (renewed annually), an Acquia Bronze Level Partner, and an Upsun partner for managed Drupal platforms. It is certified under Spain's National Security Scheme (ENS), and holds ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 14001 for environmental management, the certifications public tenders increasingly require rather than prefer.
The compliance track record spans GDPR, WCAG 2.1 AA as today's legal accessibility baseline, and preparation for NIS2 requirements. Metadrop provides the technical translation of these obligations, not the legal opinion (an interpretation, not legal advice).
120+ Drupal modules contributed to drupal.org and 500+ issue credits, sustained year on year, place Metadrop among the more active Drupal contributors by contributed-project count. Parts of the delivery toolchain are public as well, including Aljibe, the DDEV add-on Metadrop's own projects run on, together with the testing, release and audit tooling around it, so a client can install it and check the same quality gates. Metadrop engineers have given 50+ talks at DrupalCon, Drupal Dev Days, DrupalCamp and other conferences, and the company is an active member of the Asociación Española de Drupal.