Most people, when they use a website, don't think much about the software behind it. This week marks five years since we reopened the SWG with Drupal software, so it seemed as good a time as any for a quick digression into what keeps the SWG running for the tech nerds and tech-curious among us.

Like the majority of automated Tolkien fanfiction archives (63%, according to Dawn's data), the SWG initially used eFiction. Originally coded by Rivka—herself a Tolkien fan and the founder of the website Council of Elrond—eFiction was easily installed and used but stopped being actively developed in 2015. Because the internet never stops evolving, when software doesn't keep up, eventually it breaks, and in 2019, that's what began to happen on the SWG as our webhost continued upgrading our server but eFiction stagnated.

Where to go from eFiction was a difficult call. We needed software that could be adapted to function as a fiction archive. We also needed something that was likely to be supported into the foreseeable future—in other words, so that we weren't rebuilding and migrating the site again in another twelve years. We eventually settled on Drupal, an open-source content management system, as the most likely candidate. In August 2020, with the world largely shut down due to COVID-19, Dawn began rebuilding the SWG archive with a local installation of Drupal 8.

It was not easy. None of the SWG moderators knew anything about Drupal, which utilizes core software extended using open-source contributed modules. Perhaps in a normal year, unable to resist the siren call of summer, the rebuild would have happened much slower or not at all. Obstacles arose regularly, seemingly as impassable as Caradhras. Eventually, however, the SWG archive existed in parallel form: in eFiction and in Drupal.

Russandol next had to figure out how to migrate 3,500 fanworks from eFiction to the new Drupal site. This also came with frequent snags, but by March 2021, the new site opened for beta, and five years ago, it opened officially.

eFiction certainly has a nostalgic appeal. It was a simple software, easy to run, and hard to break. Drupal is much more complicated and, therefore, finicky. Major updates feel just shy of terrifying, and the Venn diagram of Dawn-and-Russa-are-swamped and someone-reports-a-white-screen-of-death-on-the-site is nearly a circle. However, Drupal brings a lot more flexibility, and we have been able to extend and grow the site in ways we never could with eFiction. This is the fun part: building and adding features that make the site better for our community. And most importantly, Drupal is being actively developed and has a robust community behind it, meaning it should serve the SWG for some time to come.