The Monroe County Public Library's website is considered a virtual branch of the physical library located in Bloomington, Indiana, and serving all of Monroe County. It connects our patrons to information about our physical branches' hours, programs, and other services as well as links to the library catalog and other online databases and resources. Because the website needs to be that virtual branch for our patrons it is fairly complex and customized. The transition from Drupal 7 to Backdrop gave us the ability to keep the current design and customizations with similar maintenance and some improvements. Our patrons did not even know when we went live with Backdrop because the transition was so seamless.
An unseen part of this project was building in better version control and learning some basic module building.
When it became clear that a straight upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 was going to be much like a full-site rebuild, we started looking for some assistance with the project. After getting a recommendation from another library, we contacted Aten Design Group. With a limited budget, Aten suggested moving to Backdrop because it would be easier to convert and maintain than Drupal. Working with Laryn at Aten, I joined the Backdrop community, converted a few Drupal modules to Backdrop, and learned how to fully maintain the library Backdrop site. Now we are in a great place to start thinking about any redesign changes we might want to make in the future.
