The Utah Avalanche Center (UAC) provides avalanche forecasting, awareness, and educational to support safe winter recreation in the state of Utah. They work with a team of avalanche forecasters to create and issue avalanche advisories and avalanche warnings and provide professional development and community education resources.
We provide ongoing support for their Backdrop-based website, CiviCRM instance, and Shopify store. The UAC relies on complex data structures and custom technology to drive daily education, forecasting, and observation operations.
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 nearly 1,000 hours and significantly increase monthly security and maintenance costs for the client).
The migration to Backdrop took us about 322 hours over 10 months. The client noted how similar the Backdrop interface felt to the Drupal interface, making the client handoff between platforms smooth. One of the more difficult parts to migrate was the openlayers module. It hasn't been ported to Backdrop and it's a large module. The client was only using a small part of it so we only ported over the parts used instead of trying to get the entire module working, but it still took a while since it made heavy use of ctools exportables which we converted into Backdrop configuration.
Regular season operations started back up in the fall smoothly, with only a few bugs needs to be addressed as a result of the migration.
