What is Reddit's opinion of Backdrop CMS?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

While backdrop the code can be seen as a fork of drupal 7, what it definitely is not is a fork of the community and all that goes along with it.

1. Backdrop has 2 main contributors, and maybe 20-25 additional people helping out porting modules and submitting random pull request. There is very little evidence that their reason for forking had much traction or resonance from the community.
2. Drupal 8 had 1583 different people submit 32851 patches in 2014. 758 of those people are new contributors in 2014.
3. Drupal provides an updates service to let you know when your code is out of date, backdrop you'll need to check github.
4. Drupal has a security team with many extremely competent volunteers on it. "Backdrop CMS does not yet have any security announcements." (From here https://backdropcms.org/security)
5. It lacks a command line tool like drush that would facilitate management.
6. A website isnt something you buy once and just have. It is going to constantly grow and change, and if you're a small business owner you're going to need to find people who can manage your site and your needs. It will be difficult to find people who advertise themselves as backdrop experts once it diverges far enough from drupal 7 that they're truly different products. Its hard enough as it is to find a drupal developer who isnt already working for an agency building big projects.

In all, while I feel like its a noble effort, I think the developers have grossly underestimated the herculean task they have taken on, and without a massive influx of people to help them, they are going to basically be trying to catch up to the functionality that drupal 7 provides, without actually surpassing any of its functionality, and yet be unable to produce a product that can compete with something like wordpress.

The overall number of Drupal sites has been flat since 2015. It's the turquoise line on that graph.

Drupal 8 installs are rising slowly but at the expense of D7 and D6. So people are ~~upgrading~~ migrating their Drupal sites to the latest version but few completely new Drupal sites are being built.

The writing is on the wall. Drupal has peaked. Learn JS if you can stand it. Other interesting options include Laravel, Python or backdrop (a D7 fork that I tried out yesterday. It's pretty great!)

You sound like a good candidate for https://backdropcms.org, which is an awesome free open source fork of Drupal 7, that has a lot of Drupal 8 features such as config management, etc. It does not have Symfony or Composer dependencies.

I'm a developer working with Drupal 8, so I'm a little biased here, but I can recommend both 8 and Drupal 7. D7 especially is a very mature and stable platform with a thriving and active community. If you are looking for even more simplicity, give Backdrop a try, but the plugin ecosystem isn't near what Drupal's is.

backdrop is a fork of D7 that has been enhanced quite a bit since it split off. Views, ctools and Wysiwyg in core, for example. Module and theme development is basically the same as D7. The top 100 D7 modules have been ported and usually porting a D7 module to backdrop is super basic.

I've been using it for a small web app recently. There's been a few problems but nothing too crazy.

Backdrop (https://backdropcms.org) is an excellent choice, but I would recommend a Drupal 8 test, first. As of 8.1.x, there is a direct migration path for content in core which works surprisingly well. It's well worth a half day's work to try, it might wind up saving you a ton of time. D8 will also set your client, and your skills / workflows, up for the future. At my old agency we took a bit of a (purposeful) financial hit on our first D8 project (launched 6 months ago), but then were able to take off running on new D8 work which has been very steady.

While lots of D6 / D7 modules aren't available in D8 yet, there's a fair chance you might not even need them. D8 pulled in a ton of functionality that used to live in contrib, Views, WYSIWYG, etc. Some good detail on D6 upgrade path is available at https://www.drupal.org/drupal-6-eol.

I agree. With only 16 contrib modules and no real website yet I think they way behind the curve. No drop in Google Analytics module is a killer in and of itself.

Depending on the complexity of your site, you may also want to consider Backdrop - https://backdropcms.org/ . It's a fork of Drupal 7 that the Backdrop community will continue supporting.

Yes. If PHP <7 was still being maintained, even Drupal 5 sites would still be viable. That would be sites lasting for 10+ years. You should anticipate that any site you build, no matter what the technology, will need to be replaced by 5 years, and you should start the upgrade project from 3 years. If you are continuously developing, you can spread the cost more evenly over the 5 years otherwise you will need to make investments periodically and find money for it in your business.

As far as D8, the other replies explained it already-- D8+ upgrade process will be more gentle, like a windows service pack vs a full upgrade. D8 is complex and just like D7 it has taken a while to mature. I remember the earlier D7 days we were waiting for years for contrib to catch up, and now D7 is a very robust platform and even has its own fork (https://backdropcms.org/) I haven't tried it but to me it is missing the thing that makes Drupal the best-- the community.

D7 was treated as more of an application than a developing environment, and the move to D8 may not be what you're looking for. With D8 you become more of a software developer (hence the move to composer).

There ARE some other CMS systems that maintain the D7 paradigm. Some can even port your site.

https://backdropcms.org/

• I seem to remember some others that I looked into, but can't find them right now. You probably can w/ some time and google.

Yep! D8 kinda went in a different direction that I'm not so sure about (built for large-scale enterprise stuff), but there's also Backdrop which is a fork of Drupal meant to be more like D7.

> I hope the leadership on Drupal decides to go in the other direction for D9.

I don't want to say something like this could never happen, but it's more likely we'll find complex life on Mars or one of Jupiter's moons. The Drupal leadership is very, very much invested in how Drupal 8 is designed, and there is so much stuff that is now possible in Drupal 8—that wasn't possible with the old architecture—that Drupal 9 will not come out for at least a decade, if at all. And if/when it does come out, it's almost certainly not going to be a Drupal-7-to-Drupal-8 type change.

If you don't want to leave the Drupal 7 island, your hopes are better left directed at Backdrop ever becoming a thing that real people use in real-world scenarios.

Another important alternative is Backdrop CMS. It's essentially an updated fork of Drupal 7, so migrating is really the easiest choice. Remember, even with D8 and D9, more than 50% of Drupal sites are still on D7. https://backdropcms.org/

BackdropCMS is a great alternative to Drupal if you are looking for something simpler and that does not require tools like Composer.

There are well over 600 modules for Backdrop, most of them are ports of Drupal 7 modules that you are familiar with. More and more Drupal 7 modules are being ported every week. The Backdrop community is focused on improving the experience of end users and site builders.

"Backdrop values the needs of the editor and architect over the needs of the developer."https://backdropcms.org/philosophy

Try using backdrop. https://backdropcms.org/

Its easier to set up than drupal (has views and most things you need installed out of the box as core). Its on par with Drupal 7 but has regular security updates. You can update it in place (no need to download anything, just click the toggle and it will do it for you). You can host it anywhere, even godaddy. I use low tier scalahosting.com hosting and it loads pretty darn fast.

Your theory sounds logical. But I see another story in the usage stats. The D7 crowd was offered two different products at the same time: D8 and Backdrop (aka D7+). And in the beginning Backdrop offered a lot more bang for the buck. Sensible improvements on a known base.

Right now, D8 has almost 400 thousand installs. Backdrop has 1280 reported installs. Not 12 thousand or 120 thousand. I expected at least an order of magnitude more, even when taking into account the lack of the name "Drupal" and the marketing machine that Acquia and the DA represent.

This tells me that the majority of current D7 sites are simply there to rot. They are not going anywhere. Meanwhile, the remaining agencies in the ecosystem have made up their minds. 400k is far from the old million, but those were the days before JS become the dominant web technology.

Sorry, I don't know of any tool that does just that and is quick and simple to set up. But in general I suggest you have a look at web app frameworks and/or CMS so you get familiar with at least one. Once you know how to set up a highly customisable CMS, a task like this will be a quick one in the future. Specifically I'm thinking of Drupal 7. (Drupal 8 as well, but it became more of a complicated framework compared to older versions.) You can create custom data types, tables, filterable and searchable views and a lot more without having to code anything. If you don't want to use the old version of Drupal (support will run out not too long from now), there is also a folk if it called Backdrop. There are other suitable systems as well. I'm sure there are extensions for wordpress and Joomla that enable you to create what you need without coding.

How is D8 unreliable? IMHO is really solid.

Anywho.. I'd really recommend moving over to Backdrop. It's a well-maintained fork of D7 that is really easy to port over to. It has a lot of the D8 niceties (like configuration management), but without the heavy lift. https://backdropcms.org/

Also worth mentioning that Backdrop CMS has been doing some pretty cool things lately with their own layout builder. I converted a small website for fun and other than theming it was pretty painless.

https://backdropcms.org/news/backdrop-1-14-released

I am pro Drupal 8 at this point and beginning to love developing with it. However, I also have complex and working Drupal 7 sites for clients who have no interest in a major upgrade.

I'm not actually worried. Drupal 6 post end-of-life has been a piece of cake for most installations, and I expect the same from Drupal 7. I even have a former client who is still successfully using a Drupal 5 site for a complex web app (w/ Drupal mostly as a container for custom code). It works.

We have two more years to think about whether we want to upgrade to Drupal 8 already or just keep thinks ticking along with post-end-of-life support options or an easier migration to BackDrop CMS.

If you want to continue on D7-style development, there's always Backdrop, which is kind of like "Drupal 7, beyond, if Drupal 8 had never happened".

But in terms of the Drupal community, if it wasn't clear a couple years ago, Drupal 8 is the future, and Drupal 9 is going to basically be Drupal 8, with more deprecated functions removed.

I still run a half dozen D7 sites, and a couple I'm going to migrate to static sites, the rest to Drupal 8. There's a lot more momentum in both those spaces, depending on the type of site you're building.

Back in D7's heyday, there didn't exist hundreds of really awesome static site frameworks, Go-based 'lightweight' CMSes, even some of the other nice light PHP alternatives. It was basically Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, or one of a half dozen other frameworks if you didn't want to get super programmy.

Times change, and we have to adapt too. That means, for me at least, that not every site that was an ideal fit for Drupal 7 is an ideal fit for Drupal 8. That's okay, though... Drupal 7 is almost ten years old, which is basically ancient ruins in today's insane web world.

That site is a version of HAX that's not hooked up to a CMS. HAX module was ported to work with vanilla Drupal 6, Drupal 7, and Backdrop 1.x.x. Can be spun up in the Champion distribution quickly. After download / install go into profiles/modules/contrib/hax and run bower install and you'll be good to go. Right now comes with some known working elements out of the box and there are some theme compatibility things to scope better across systems but the CMS integration side appears to be working itself out. Feedback / impressions / suggestions appreciated https://www.drupal.org/project/champion https://www.drupal.org/project/hax https://backdropcms.org/project/hax

Id like to use exhibit A https://backdropcms.org.

Id also like to note that drupal 7 modules are no longer compatible with backdrop.

A module I maintain has to be maintained separately for backdrop, and someone has to backfill the changes we make.

https://backdropcms.org/project/services

Have you looked at Backdrop yet? It's a D7 fork that has some... interesting ideas. I spun up a demo today and it's pretty much exactly like D7 on the front, but WAY faster. Didn't have a chance to look at the code yet tho.