- Client
- Ideahunters — crowdsourced-challenge platform
- Sector
- Community platforms / legacy migration
- Period
- July–August 2026
At a glance
Ideahunters is a crowdsourcing platform where brands post a challenge and a community submits ideas against a deadline. The original site ran on Drupal 7 — end-of-life, unsupported, and increasingly a liability — with over a decade of challenges, discussions and member accounts in it. The platform was rebuilt on Drupal 11 and the legacy content migrated across: 426 pieces of content and 921 user accounts, anonymized on the way in.
The challenge
Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 is not an upgrade, it is a re-platforming: the content model, the theme layer and the API all changed generations. The archive had real value — 328 discussion threads and dozens of brand challenges with their submitted ideas — but also real risk: fifteen-year-old member data that should not simply be copied forward as-is into a new system under current privacy expectations.
The solution
A two-track job. The platform itself was rebuilt cleanly on Drupal 11.4 rather than dragged through five major-version upgrades — new content types for challenges, ideas and discussions that mirror the old structure where it earned its keep and simplify it where it did not.
The content then came across through scripted migration maps (exported from the D7 database, replayed into D11), with user accounts anonymized during the transfer — identities reduced to what the archive needs to stay coherent, mapped old-UID to new-UID so every idea still belongs to its author. The maps live in version control, so the migration is repeatable and auditable rather than a one-night heroic import.
The results
The platform now runs on supported software: Drupal 11.4 on PHP 8.3, with 46 ideas, 16 challenge listings, 328 discussions and 36 pages of the legacy archive live and browsable, and 921 anonymized accounts preserved. A nightly Trello-board backup timer and the server's standard backup routine cover it going forward.
For any organisation still on Drupal 7, this is the shape of the way out: rebuild the platform on 11, script the content across, and treat the user data with more care than the original site ever had to.
