Sector(s)

Team Members

salimlakhani, Amet lenis

Project Team

Parents Helping Parents Volunteer Tech Team, DevPanel DevOps Team, Community Volunteers.

Learn more https://tidycal.com/devpanel

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

The PHP migration demonstrates how DevPanel helps nonprofits and small teams contribute to the Drupal ecosystem by:

  • Expanding Nonprofit Adoption: Showing how Drupal can serve as a cost-effective, enterprise-grade solution for nonprofits using AWS credits.

  • Lowering Barriers for Volunteers: Cloud-based dev environments (CBDEs) made it easier for volunteer developers to contribute without complex local setups, fostering more community involvement.

  • Reusable Best Practices: The migration playbook—using unlimited environments, Cloudflare CDN/WAF, and Infrastructure-as-Code—can be adopted by other Drupal projects facing similar cost and scalability challenges.

  • Case Study Sharing: By publishing this success story, DevPanel and PHP help other nonprofits see what’s possible with Drupal and cloud automation, encouraging broader community adoption

Parents Helping Parents (PHP), a nonprofit serving families raising children with disabilities, relied on a complex WordPress website hosted on WP Engine. High hosting costs (~$1,800/year), limited environments, and an aging codebase made the setup unsustainable. PHP wanted to modernize its infrastructure while staying within its tight nonprofit budget.

By migrating to AWS with DevPanel, PHP cut hosting costs to essentially $0 through $5,000/year in AWS nonprofit credits, gained unlimited development and staging environments, and dramatically improved both performance and security. Developers now launch new environments instantly with browser-based VS Code, Cloudflare CDN integration delivers faster global performance, and a built-in WAF blocks malicious traffic.

The entire migration—including a major codebase upgrade—was completed in ~6 weeks, with 3–4 weeks of active work. Post-migration, PHP’s site runs faster, more securely, and at a fraction of the cost, freeing resources to support its mission

About the project

Goals
Parents Helping Parents (PHP), a nonprofit serving families of children with disabilities, needed to modernize its web infrastructure while cutting costs. The organization’s goals were to:

  • Reduce hosting expenses that consumed a significant portion of the nonprofit budget.

  • Replace WP Engine’s limited hosting plan with a flexible solution that allowed unlimited environments.

  • Upgrade and secure a legacy codebase while maintaining availability for critical community services.

  • Improve site performance for members accessing event registrations, directories, and resources.

  • Empower a volunteer-driven tech team with tools that simplified development and onboarding.

Requirements
The project required:

  • A cost-effective hosting platform compatible with AWS nonprofit credits.

  • Unlimited dev/stage/test environments to support code upgrades and parallel development.

  • Cloud-based dev environments (CBDEs) for faster onboarding of volunteers.

  • CDN and WAF integration for performance and security.

  • Automation for backups, monitoring, and rollbacks.

Outcome
The migration to AWS with DevPanel delivered measurable success:

  • Hosting costs dropped from ~$1,800/year to effectively $0, covered by AWS credits.

  • Infrastructure setup and environment creation became automated, eliminating bottlenecks.

  • Developers can now spin up fully working test environments for each Git branch, enabling true parallel development.

  • Volunteer onboarding time shrank from days to hours thanks to browser-based VS Code environments.

  • Performance improved by 20–30% globally with Cloudflare CDN, while WAF blocked hundreds of malicious requests weekly.

  • The site has remained stable, secure, and cost-free since migration, with zero security incidents.

By completing the migration in ~6 weeks, PHP not only modernized its infrastructure but also unlocked new capacity to focus on its mission of supporting families, rather than wrestling with hosting constraints

Why Drupal was chosen

Parents Helping Parents needed a platform that could support a complex membership portal, integrate with third-party systems (CRM, donations, email lists), and scale securely while staying affordable for a nonprofit. Drupal was the natural choice because:

  • Flexibility: Its modular architecture supports integrations with external services and custom workflows critical to PHP’s mission.

  • Community Support: As an open-source project, Drupal benefits from continuous improvements, security patches, and a strong nonprofit user base.

  • Scalability: Combined with DevPanel and AWS, Drupal can scale up for spikes in traffic during events or campaigns without expensive hosting upgrades.

  • Cost-effectiveness: Using AWS nonprofit credits with Drupal allowed PHP to virtually eliminate hosting costs while still running on enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Drupal provided PHP with an enterprise-class CMS that could grow with their needs, while DevPanel removed the barriers of managing complex AWS infrastructure.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

The selected modules and custom theme were chosen to balance functionality, security, and ease of use for a nonprofit with limited technical resources:

  • Drupal Core + Views were used to give PHP flexibility in managing structured content, event listings, and member directories without requiring custom development for every change.

  • Webform provided an easy way to collect registrations, donations, and community feedback, critical to PHP’s mission-driven programs.

  • Pathauto & Redirect ensured user-friendly, SEO-optimized URLs, which improved accessibility and discoverability for parents searching for resources.

  • Media/CKEditor allowed staff and volunteers to manage rich media content (videos, PDFs, images) with minimal training.

  • Security Kit and reCAPTCHA were added to strengthen protection against bots, spam, and common web exploits.

  • Custom Membership Theme ensured the site reflected PHP’s brand while being accessible and mobile-friendly.

  • Cloudflare integration was chosen to deliver global performance improvements and enterprise-grade WAF protection, while remaining cost-effective under nonprofit budgets.

Together, these modules and configurations gave PHP a scalable, secure, and easy-to-manage platform, ensuring long-term sustainability without expensive vendor lock-in