ColdFusion to LAMP for 15,000 users

ColdFusion ran the university's web applications for years, and it did its job. I respect that. But the world around it moved on. Hiring ColdFusion developers got harder every year, the ecosystem kept shrinking, and every new integration felt like swimming upstream. Moving to LAMP meant a larger talent pool, a massive open-source ecosystem, and tooling that let us ship faster with the people we had.

This was never about chasing something shiny. The old stack was quietly taxing every project, and the new one would let us serve students and staff better.

The ColdFusion apps were monolithic. Business logic tangled into CFML templates, a proprietary application server in the middle of everything. I rewrote the application logic in PHP/MySQL and tuned the stack for performance under load. The real shift was decoupling. I put REST APIs in front of the data so the same backend could serve the CMS, Salesforce, and PeopleSoft sync jobs. That API layer did not exist before. It was the single most important decision in the project.

With 15,000+ users depending on these systems, there was no big-bang cutover, especially not near enrollment season. We ran old and new in parallel, migrated module by module, validated data at each step. I built the sync layer first, tested it against production data in staging, then moved user-facing pieces over.

Honest version of what broke: data migration is where migrations go to die. Years of ColdFusion-era data had quirks. Inconsistent formats, fields used for purposes nobody remembered, edge cases buried in enrollment records. The sync jobs caught most of it, but the first stretch after cutover surfaced records needing manual reconciliation. Session handling behaved differently between the CFML server and PHP, which caused confusing login issues early on. We fixed those by tightening session configuration and adding logging we should have had from day one.

I also built the university's Drupal multisite architecture from scratch via terminal: full LAMP provisioning, virtual hosts, shared codebase. REST APIs and scheduled sync jobs across Cascade CMS, Salesforce, and PeopleSoft. Internal tools too: searchable staff directory, phone management, multi-step approval workflows. The stack changes. The approach doesn't.