For some years we’ve run a website called computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk. As the name may suggest, it contains advice and information about how to use the computers here in the School of Informatics. In fact, it’s the place to look for such information. In the old days, help for computer users was spread over a number of sites, and that was confusing for everybody.

Each year we put a lot of effort into keeping the site’s content up to date, accurate and helpful, but despite this, we still had two big problems.

The first was that the software on which the site was built – version 7 of the Drupal content management system – is due to become unsupported on 5 January 2025, the 14th anniversary of its release. If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider that this support is what keeps security holes in the software patched, and that computing.help is available outside of our intranet, out on the open internet, and that such internationally available sites have become targets for not just well-funded and determined mafia organisations but also for states fighting undeclared covert war on those they consider enemies. We very much do not want any sites we run to be compromised and then destroyed or used for evil purposes; so it’s essential that all software we use receives timely official security updates.

The second problem was that the site had not kept pace with improvements in web design. One major advance in recent years has been in responsive design – that is, sites which are just as accessible whatever sort of device is being used. The old site was particularly poor on mobile phones, for instance. In addition, the front page had become over-complicated, and this alone was enough to scare some people away.

We had expected to simply upgrade the site’s software from Drupal 7 to whatever the latest version of Drupal was. We tried this. Sadly, Drupal has changed too much in the intervening years to make this easy, and our attempts to migrate the site to Drupal 10 was abandoned when the content of the web pages failed to be migrated. Since the content, the several hundred pages of help and advice and useful links, was the main thing we needed to preserve, this was a big blow.

In theory it may have been possible to do a multi-stage migration from Drupal 7 to (for instance) Drupal 9, and then again from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10; but we decided that we did not have time to mess around with this on the off-chance, when there was already a solution which was far more likely to work: Backdrop CMS. Backdrop CMS is a forked development of Drupal 7, with a few good ideas from Drupal 8 added. Unsurprisingly, it’s far more compatible with Drupal 7 than recent versions of Drupal are. So, we migrated the site to Backdrop CMS. This worked like a dream.

After migrating, we changed the site from a very old visual theme (“Bluemarine”) to a more modern one (“Axioma”). This brought responsive design into play. Hey presto: the site now works on mobile phones.

We also greatly simplified the front page, changing its main panel to contain very simple instructions on how to use the site. We hope that the greater simplicity of the text, together with the visual simplicity of the design, make the site less intimidating to newcomers and easier for everyone to navigate, search and use.

We hope that the resulting site works well for you, and is useful. If you have any comments or helpful tips, we’d be interested to see them: just use the usual contact computing support page.

The computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk upgrade / Computing Systems by is licensed under a