Rebuilding a live LMS is risky. Rebuilding it while it powers mission-critical training for organizations like the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO is even harder. This session takes you through that journey—from growing pains and technical debt to a fully reimagined Drupal-native solution—sharing the lessons learned along the way.

Prerequisite

- Basic understanding of Drupal (site building or development)
- Familiarity with contributed modules and Drupal architecture
- Interest in large-scale platform evolution or LMS systems (helpful but not required)

Target Audience

Drupal developers, architects, and experienced site builders working on complex or large-scale platforms. Especially valuable for those facing limitations of contributed modules, planning migrations, or evolving long-lived Drupal systems.

Outline

What happens when your LMS outgrows its foundation? This session tells the story of how a long-running e-learning platform for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), later adopted by the AFL-CIO, evolved from a heavily customized Opigno-based solution into a fully Drupal-native LMS.
Originally launched in 2018 by Tag1 Consulting, the platform scaled across multiple high-impact education sites. However, limitations in flexibility, maintainability, and community responsiveness led the team to rethink the architecture. Starting in 2022, the project underwent a major transformation: key modules were forked, legacy constraints removed, and new foundations built using Drupal core APIs.
We’ll walk through the journey from technical debt to innovation, including the first clean alpha release in 2024, the official Drupal LMS project launch in 2025, and the successful production migration in early 2026.
Learn how collaboration between agencies, organizations, and the Drupal community resulted in a modular, extensible LMS ecosystem now powering platforms like Share My Lesson and AFSCME Education.
This is a real-world success story about rebuilding the plane mid-flight—and landing stronger.

Learning Objectives

- Understand the challenges of scaling and maintaining complex Drupal distributions
- Learn when and how to transition from contrib-based solutions to custom architectures
- Explore strategies for incremental rewrites and safe migrations in production environments
- Discover how Drupal core APIs can power flexible, extensible LMS solutions
- Gain insights into cross-organization collaboration (agency + nonprofits + open source community)
- Identify best practices for building and sustaining a Drupal ecosystem of modules

Experience level
Anyone