In 2014, we worked with myShakespeare to design and build a responsive, interactive Drupal website that replaces traditional footnotes with multimedia resources for contemporary students. Over more than a decade since we've partnered with them to expand the site, add plays and functionality, integrate with third-party platforms (including Clever and Google Classrooms), and grow their reach to become one of the leading online Shakespeare resources for students with over 1 million monthly visits. To support their complex application and increasing traffic, we've developed a robust multi-server infrastructure using Kubernetes on Digital Ocean to keep their servers up when students and teachers need them most.
With the Drupal 7 EOL on the horizon, we wanted to relocate this site to a platform that could handle its complex data structures, but found it difficult to justify the cost and long-term cost implications of a move to Drupal 10 (which we estimated would take over 1,500 hours and significantly increase monthly security and maintenance costs for the client).
The migration to Backdrop took us about 400 hours over 9 months. The migration process was fairly simple, and the client noted how similar the Backdrop interface felt to the Drupal interface, making client hand-off between platforms smooth. We built out a new module for this site which allowed YouTube and Vimeo files from the Drupal 7 Media module to be seamlessly migrated over to Backdrop, which we'll release to the Backdrop community soon. We also contributed back some fixes to the S3FS, Field Group, and Field Collection modules.
