Posted by DanM on Fri, Jul 22, 2022 - 9:00am

I initially started rebuilding my Drupal 8 site locally (and manually copying content) using both Drupal 9 and Backdrop CMS. At some point, my Backdrop installation got messed up, so I went on to finish the site with Drupal 9. Now that it's ready to deploy, I'm thinking that Drupal 9 is making my life way more complicated than necessary - I'm a content creator / photographer, not a dedicated web developer.

Now I'm thinking of starting over again with Backdrop. A large percentage of the content is built around photography which in D9 is set up using the Media module and Colorbox. In Backdrop, is the basic Image type similar to what it was in D7, or will I be able to add caption fields. Will I be able to reuse media as is possible with D9?

If I do this, I will simply copy and paste content from the D9 site as I did when I updated from D8, unless there is an easier way. The 3-contributor site has a lot of content, but it's doable.

Would appreciate any suggestions that might help make maintaining things easier going forward. I'm guessing using GIT is the way to go, right? (That's been a huge stumbling block with D9).

 

Accepted answer

@DanM - Sorry to hear about your frustrating journey.

My quick answer is that you are asking some fairly big questions with limited information. If you are able to stop into one of our online "office hours" I think that we could be more helpful and discuss more options. Office hours happen on Wednesdays and you can find more information here: https://backdropcms.org/news/events

> will I be able to add caption fields

Unless you have very specific requirements, adding captions should not be a problem in Backdrop. I suspect that there may even be more than one way to do this and it may be an issue of deciding on the best solution for your use case.

> Will I be able to reuse media as is possible with D9?

I'm not exactly sure how the media module in Drupal 9 does this, but when adding an image to your Backdrop content, you do have the option to select and reuse existing images on the site from an image library. 

This image library is a VIEW of image files and can be customized to suit your needs. In this screenshot, I've added the "tags" field and filter to this view, it's not there by default.

> I'm guessing using GIT is the way to go, right?

Personally, I would encourage folks to use GIT. But, it is by no means required. It depends a lot on whether or not you are doing local (on your home/work computer) development and moving it to the server?

I find that if you understand GIT, it makes your life a lot easier. However, if you primarily have a single site and are doing your development directly on the server, GIT is not required and may not offer much benefit.

In terms of migrating your data from Drupal 9 to BackdropCMS, you might be able use something like the feeds module to speed up the process. You could google Drupal 7/8/9 resources on the feeds module and I expect the process will work roughly the same in all three versions, as well as in Backdrop. 

Comments

Fri, Jul 22, 2022 - 10:56am by stpaultim

@DanM - Sorry to hear about your frustrating journey.

My quick answer is that you are asking some fairly big questions with limited information. If you are able to stop into one of our online "office hours" I think that we could be more helpful and discuss more options. Office hours happen on Wednesdays and you can find more information here: https://backdropcms.org/news/events

> will I be able to add caption fields

Unless you have very specific requirements, adding captions should not be a problem in Backdrop. I suspect that there may even be more than one way to do this and it may be an issue of deciding on the best solution for your use case.

> Will I be able to reuse media as is possible with D9?

I'm not exactly sure how the media module in Drupal 9 does this, but when adding an image to your Backdrop content, you do have the option to select and reuse existing images on the site from an image library. 

This image library is a VIEW of image files and can be customized to suit your needs. In this screenshot, I've added the "tags" field and filter to this view, it's not there by default.

> I'm guessing using GIT is the way to go, right?

Personally, I would encourage folks to use GIT. But, it is by no means required. It depends a lot on whether or not you are doing local (on your home/work computer) development and moving it to the server?

I find that if you understand GIT, it makes your life a lot easier. However, if you primarily have a single site and are doing your development directly on the server, GIT is not required and may not offer much benefit.

In terms of migrating your data from Drupal 9 to BackdropCMS, you might be able use something like the feeds module to speed up the process. You could google Drupal 7/8/9 resources on the feeds module and I expect the process will work roughly the same in all three versions, as well as in Backdrop. 

Sun, Aug 27, 2023 - 1:17pm by DanM

DIdn't see this when it was answered, but here I am a year later with the same question having finally decided to tackle this site rebuilding again. Fortunately got over the big hurdles this time and looked up captioning images. Thanks for this info. In D8, I added a short html text field to an image. That's all I need for Backdrop too, so that's the route I'll take.

Fri, Jul 22, 2022 - 11:17am by DanM

I appreciate the quick and detailed response, @stpaultim .

I can live without reusing images, since I don't do it that often anyway. I was fairly well along with Backdrop a few months ago and developing both Backdrop and D9 versions of the site simultaneously to compare which was easier. Backdrop was for sure, but I kept going forward with D9 when I ran into an issue with the entity module.

Just one site, developing on my home computer and moving stuff to the live site and continuing from there, with regular backups. Yes, GIT may be overkill, though I like the idea of it -  guess I'm not savvy or comfortable enough with it to get it set up with d9.

I'll keep the open online office hours handy. Thanks for the link.