[kwlug-disc] OT: Drupal 7 Migration to Backdrop CMS

[Ronald Barnes]

Khalid Baheyeldin wrote on 2022-11-21 18:26:

> Despite Drupal 8 coming out, and then going into End Of Life after 
> Drupal 9 was released, there are still more active Drupal 7 sites (~ 
> 439,000) than all of 8.x, 9.x and 10.x combined (~ 380,000).

That seems rather damning with regards to the upgrade path.

I went through it from 6 to 7 and am determined to stick with 7 as long 
as possible.

Have given consideration to running "wget" on the sites and only 
exposing the resulting static files.


> The effort to upgrade from 7 to later versions is massive, and that is 
> why smaller sites have stuck with 7. Drupal.org itself is still on 7, 
> but that is mainly because of a complex set of modules that handle 
> module issues, releases, ..etc.

I don't feel quite so lazy now.


 > Meanwhile, there is another path to stay with Drupal 7 for longer. It
 > is called Backdrop CMS. It is a fork of Drupal 7 that happened years
 > ago, with some improvements in storing the configuration as JSON
 > files, a much better layout manager, and various things here and
 > there.
 >
 > Backdrop CMS has many of the contrib modules already in core (Views,
 > ...etc), and is 30% faster out of the box.

This sounds like the way to go.


Thanks for the heads-up on this.


I wonder if I heard of them a year (or two?) ago, when the kerfuffle 
about some package being forcefully removed happened?  Something like 
colorBlah package had known vulnerabilities and no maintainers, so the 
plug was pulled, leaving lots of sites hosed.

Was Backdrop born from that? Or gained exposure as they were offering to 
adopt the abandoned package?



rb