BuildingGreen
A 12-year partnership transforming a legacy publishing and product-rating platform into a modern, unified Drupal ecosystem with Commerce subscriptions, event registration, and multi-domain content delivery.
The Challenge
BuildingGreen had operated a ColdFusion-based website for over a decade, delivering green building product reviews, research articles, and continuing education content to architects and sustainability professionals. The legacy platform was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, suffered from poor performance, and couldn't support the modern e-commerce features the business needed — including subscription management, event registration, and integrated search across multiple content domains.
The organization also ran several related properties on separate platforms, creating content silos and duplicated editorial effort. They needed a unified platform that could serve multiple audiences while maintaining distinct editorial experiences.
The Solution
We migrated BuildingGreen from ColdFusion to Drupal in a phased approach, starting with Drupal 6 and evolving through Drupal 7 as the platform matured. The migration preserved over 15 years of editorial content — thousands of product reviews, articles, and continuing education records — while introducing modern content modeling and editorial workflows.
We implemented Drupal Commerce for subscription management, allowing BuildingGreen to sell annual access plans, process renewals, and manage institutional licensing. Event registration for their annual conference was built on Commerce with custom order workflows. Apache Solr provided faceted search across the entire content library.
The platform was consolidated onto Pantheon for hosting, with multi-domain support allowing different brands to share a single codebase and content repository while presenting distinct front-end experiences.
The Results
12+ years of continuous development and partnership. A unified multi-domain platform replaced three separate websites. Commerce subscriptions automated revenue operations that were previously handled manually. Consolidated hosting on Pantheon reduced infrastructure costs and simplified deployments. The platform successfully supported BuildingGreen's growth from a niche publication to an industry-standard resource for sustainable building professionals.
—Ben has been our trusted development partner for over a decade. He understands our business as well as any member of our team, and he's guided us through multiple major platform transitions without a hitch.