Lake Champlain Access Television is Community Media for the Towns of Colchester, Milton, Georgia, Fairfax, Westford, South Hero, Grand Isle and North Hero, VT.
Triangulus has been working with LCATV and other community media outlets in Vermont for more than a decade. We saw the D7 EOL announcement years ago and did the right thing for our trusted client, LCATV and got them on track for the switch to Backdrop. We launched the new Backdrop site https://lcatv.org about a year ago.
The LCATV site is well developed and stores metadata for thousands of locally produced television programs. We have a system in place that pushes up videos regularly to Amazon for online streaming. That system is Linux based and works with the AWS command line tools and operates in parallel with the Backdrop system. We've recently updated the Linux side of things and LCATV's turnaround time for on demand video is faster than it's ever been. Better than ever with Backdrop and Linux.
While we were making the transition to Backdrop, we made improvements in the codebase and simplified some things. We recommend refactoring when possible and the switch to Backdrop is a great time to evaluate which modules could get removed, which code could get simplified, etc.
We chose Borg as our base theme because it's gotten the most love and attention from the Backdrop team. We spun a sub-theme off of that for our work. We used graphics provided by LCATV that highlight the local scenic beauty and help users navigate smoothly and comfortably through the site. There was a lot of testing and tuning the theme to make sure LCATV staff were pleased with how it worked on all pages for all users. Triangulus and LCATV enjoy clean design principles that make site navigation pleasant and coherent.
The hardest parts of the transition to Backdrop were the theme and the custom module rework. The Backdrop setup is custom tailored to LCATV's needs and allows them to work efficiently with confidence that they are running a solid system that they can depend on. There have been no major outages or site downtime in the past year of Backdrop operation. Site upgrades have been smooth sailing too!
After the transition to Backdrop and improvements in the Linux system that pushes video to Amazon, LCATV is in great shape moving forward. Backdrop provides a solid framework for LCATV for years moving forward. Backdrop gives you the confidence to know that your system will run long and strong.
Backdrop was chosen because Triangulus and LCATV are both comfortable with Drupal 7 and know how it works on the front and back ends. Also there is a custom module that Triangulus built for LCATV that addresses
- automated airtime notifications (you get an email when your show is scheduled to play on TV)
- integrated scheduling with the Castus playback system
- clickable agenda items
- and much more
Backdrop code is very close to Drupal 7 code and so transitioning the custom module code to Backdrop was much easier than going the Drupal 9/10/11 route. LCATV has invested a lot in their Drupal 7 site and the switch to Backdrop helped them preserve that investment with maximum flexibility. Go Backdrop!
