I have a new project which I don't want to follow the Drupal 10,11... backdrop is an option, but am not sure if backdrop still developing, I am not seeing lots drupal7 moved to Backdrop last month and Backdrop 2.0 is still unavaiable ?
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Dear dd123,
What are your criteria for this "still developing" and what makes you doubt it? Have you ever tried to make a website with Backdrop CMS or do you want reliable 100% guarantees before trying at all?
I have been working with Backdrop CMS (as a regular user, I am not part of the developer community) since 2016 and I can testify to how in practice the system successfully develops and improves with each new version.
I am only mentioning the integration of the most frequently used modules into the core.
There are already over 1000 additional modules for the system, and their number is constantly increasing. Unlike Drupal 7, here you will not find many competing modules with similar functionality, so this number is even more impressive and efficient.
Work on adding new modules is underway, gradually and systematically - month after month, year after year.
The planned development schedule is strictly adhered to, the next planned version is 1.31 - in May 2025.
https://backdropcms.org/roadmap
The forum and community channels for user communication work responsively, there was practically no important question that I asked and I did not receive a timely answer and solution.
Regarding the Backdrop 2.0 version - I am confident that it will be implemented when the time comes, by the way, many of the goals set years ago for implementation with version 2.0 have found and continue to find a solutions in version 1.0. Including multilingual support e.g.
Usage statistics are not very reliable and should be used only as a tool for tracking trends. Many users who maintain multiple sites turn off the module sending information about statistics because they do not want to receive multiple identical messages about updates, they need only one site to do this.
https://backdropcms.org/project/usage
My company maintains over 70 sites with Backdrop CMS but only a 3-4 of them have an active Update Manager module - which sends data to create these statistics.
Just in the last 1-2 months, after the suspension of Drupal 7, there has been a unusually high trend towards an increase in the number of sites using Backdrop CMS, and according to platforms such as wappalyzer.com, the system is used by over 10,000 websites.
Wappalyzer and similar services are also not reliable statistics data because it depends on the site declaring exactly what system they use, and there are those that exclude this self-declaring or they mask it for security reasons.
They can't count the exact number of websites, but they can register trends, and that's important.
Therefore, I would advise you, before starting work with Backdrop CMS, do not look for a 100% guarantee, no one can give one. Instead, just start working and experience itself will show you that you have made the right decision.
What's more, when you work with Backdrop CMS and report issues, you are actually participating in the development of the system you rely on.
As you wrote, Backdrop CMS is an option. I would add - it is the only option. And we should be extremely grateful to the community that gives us this option.
I'm one of the developers. Backdrop is being actively developed.
We've found a lot of ways to keep improving Backdrop 1.x and keep backwards compatibility so we haven't had a need to go to 2.x which would break some of that.
It's already been said, but development is still going strong for Backdrop CMS. We have a weekly core developer meeting and have released Minor upgrades with new features every 4 months for the last 10 years. Our 30th feature release was in January of this year and was one of our biggest ever. Feel free to drop into one of our core developer meetings to get a sense of what is happening or watch the recordings here:
https://www.youtube.com/@backdropcms/streams
Backdrop CMS 2.0 has been delayed, for a few reasons:
-
We have a very strong commitment to backward compatibility and have not seen the need for any major upgrades that break APIs. We've gotten pretty good at making significant improvements without the need for a major release.
-
For a long time, we were committed to avoiding a major upgrade until at least 2 years after Drupal EOL, to provide Drupal 7 site owners considering a change some sense of stability. As Drupal 7 EOL was pushed, so was our timeline.
- We just don't have any many priority items for BackdropCMS that would require a major release anytime soon.
Here is a blog post from March of 2024 with thoughts on 2.0 at that time.
https://backdropcms.org/news/what-will-happen-in-backdrop-2x
We have over 1300 projects (not all of these have official releases) for Backdrop CMS and Drupal 7 modules continue to be ported on a weekly basis and completely new new modules are still being created for Backdrop CMS.
You can get some sense of contrib activity in our contrib space on Github. There are some big modules like Commerce that do not have an official Backdrop releasse yet, but are being used on Backdrop sites and inching closer to a release soon. NOTE: UberCart is strong and healthy in the Backdrop space and has been meeting the commerce needs of our community quite well.
A great opportunity to gauge the health of the community is coming up in a few weeks. Twice a year, we host an online event called Backdrop LIVE, and the next one is on April 3-4.
Dear dd123,
What are your criteria for this "still developing" and what makes you doubt it? Have you ever tried to make a website with Backdrop CMS or do you want reliable 100% guarantees before trying at all?
I have been working with Backdrop CMS (as a regular user, I am not part of the developer community) since 2016 and I can testify to how in practice the system successfully develops and improves with each new version.
I am only mentioning the integration of the most frequently used modules into the core.
There are already over 1000 additional modules for the system, and their number is constantly increasing. Unlike Drupal 7, here you will not find many competing modules with similar functionality, so this number is even more impressive and efficient.
Work on adding new modules is underway, gradually and systematically - month after month, year after year.
The planned development schedule is strictly adhered to, the next planned version is 1.31 - in May 2025.
https://backdropcms.org/roadmap
The forum and community channels for user communication work responsively, there was practically no important question that I asked and I did not receive a timely answer and solution.
Regarding the Backdrop 2.0 version - I am confident that it will be implemented when the time comes, by the way, many of the goals set years ago for implementation with version 2.0 have found and continue to find a solutions in version 1.0. Including multilingual support e.g.
Usage statistics are not very reliable and should be used only as a tool for tracking trends. Many users who maintain multiple sites turn off the module sending information about statistics because they do not want to receive multiple identical messages about updates, they need only one site to do this.
https://backdropcms.org/project/usage
My company maintains over 70 sites with Backdrop CMS but only a 3-4 of them have an active Update Manager module - which sends data to create these statistics.
Just in the last 1-2 months, after the suspension of Drupal 7, there has been a unusually high trend towards an increase in the number of sites using Backdrop CMS, and according to platforms such as wappalyzer.com, the system is used by over 10,000 websites.
Wappalyzer and similar services are also not reliable statistics data because it depends on the site declaring exactly what system they use, and there are those that exclude this self-declaring or they mask it for security reasons.
They can't count the exact number of websites, but they can register trends, and that's important.
Therefore, I would advise you, before starting work with Backdrop CMS, do not look for a 100% guarantee, no one can give one. Instead, just start working and experience itself will show you that you have made the right decision.
What's more, when you work with Backdrop CMS and report issues, you are actually participating in the development of the system you rely on.
As you wrote, Backdrop CMS is an option. I would add - it is the only option. And we should be extremely grateful to the community that gives us this option.