Drupal 7 Web Application and Forum to Backdrop CMS

Project Background

A tax return web application and forum community for owners of French leaseback properties was based on Drupal 7 and with the end of life of that system, the decision was taken to upgrade the website to Backdrop CMS with the content being migrated and the functionality updated. The project comprised the following objectives:

• Upgrade the tax return application so it would work on Backdrop CMS, modern PHP versions, and meet modern security best practices.
• Migrate the forum to keep all the data, structured access and keep the appearance and functionality similar
• Use an off-the-shelf theme to keep costs low, but give a relatively similar appearance.
• Help the site owner understand how to maintain and customise his site.

Project Highlights

• Ported the custom module to Backdrop CMS, improving the security of the database queries.
• After evaluating existing forum options for Backdrop CMS against the forum requirements, a custom approach was used instead, adding new features to existing modules and creating new modules.
• Created a new module, Password Requirements, to meet the needs of the site in a simpler more user-friendly way than the current method.
• Helped the site owner to understand the differences and how to maintain the site and make changes to the appearance.
• Added multiple additional features to the TAC Lite module to meet the forum access requirements.
• Created custom modules to extend contributed modules and to make certain modules work better with each other.