RECOFTC works at the intersection of forests and communities across the Asia-Pacific region, championing resilient, sustainable, and equitable forest landscapes.

With thousands of pages of multilingual content and a growing ecosystem of stakeholders, the previous site had become fragmented, overly customized, and increasingly difficult to manage.

The new RECOFTC.org is a fully restructured Drupal platform with a modular component system, clean data architecture, and editorial workflows that prioritize simplicity and scalability. The transformation wasn't just technical - it was mission-driven, enabling the organization to more effectively share research, stories, and tools with communities, donors, and partners throughout the region.

Challenges

• The most significant challenge was the data structure overhaul. The old system had deeply customized content types and inconsistently used fields, many of which had no clear equivalent in the new model. With no existing process for large-scale migrations, the team had to carefully map 700 fields, resolve missing or incompatible data, and clean up inconsistencies across multiple content types—all while preserving SEO and content integrity.
• Another challenge was balancing technical goals with editorial empowerment. Many past issues stemmed from overly complex tools and rigid workflows. Designing a cleaner backend that was self-explanatory to regional content editors required thoughtful UX and human-centered thinking.

• One of the biggest technical wins was reducing 61 custom Drupal modules down to just one.

• Years of patchwork development had led to a bloated, hard-to-maintain codebase. Rationalizing this into a single, clean, purpose-built module dramatically improved performance, maintainability, and onboarding for future developers.
• The team also had to merge a separate subsite into the main RECOFTC.org platform. This required aligning inconsistent structures, reconciling duplicated content types, and handling URL routing and redirects - all while maintaining a seamless experience for end users and preserving existing search engine rankings.
• Significant misbehaving bot traffic overloaded the server and led to introducing a CDN with HTML caching and with tag-based invalidation as a solution.