Case study · Care and Migration
sixteen years, and every platform generation in between.
WindowCleaner's community started on vBulletin 3. It runs on Discourse now. We have looked after it the whole way, including through a platform move we had nothing to gain from.
The situation
WindowCleaner runs communities for window cleaning and pressure washing professionals. WCR and Pressurewashingresource.com are trade communities, which means the archive has working value: people search it for how to price a job or handle a piece of equipment.
We began in 2010. At the time the forum ran vBulletin 3, which was then current software rather than the legacy problem it is today.
A sequence of moves, not a project
Nothing about this was a single project. It was a sequence of upgrades and migrations spread across sixteen years, each one decided when it needed deciding rather than as part of a plan anybody made in 2010.
vBulletin 3 went to later vBulletin. Later vBulletin eventually went to Discourse. Underneath that, servers were replaced, operating systems and PHP versions moved on, and the communities kept running throughout.
The value of doing it this way is that nobody ever had to reconstruct how the system worked. The people running the migration were the people who had been maintaining it since the previous one.
The store we did not follow
Alongside the communities we built custom extensions for their Magento store for a long stretch.
They later moved that store to Shopify. Shopify is a hosted platform. It does not need the kind of work we had been doing, and it was the right decision for them.
We said so, the move happened, and the relationship carried on. That is worth stating plainly because the incentive runs the other way: a studio paid to maintain custom Magento work has every reason to explain why Magento is still the answer. Ours was not, and pretending otherwise would have cost us the client eventually instead of immediately.
The result
Two communities on current software, a client relationship running since 2010, and an archive that survived every platform change along the way.
Worth comparing with PropertyTalk, which also started on vBulletin 3 and is on current vBulletin today. Same starting point, different answer, and both clients were right.
Wondering whether to move?
We will tell you what it costs to stay and what it costs to go. If staying is right, we will say so.