Do I need (will I ever need) Composer or Bee (or anything else) to create and keep single and multi-sites current with Backdrop updates?
Backdrop LIVE
April 23rd-24th, 2026
An interactive online event for anyone interested in Backdrop CMS. Everyone is welcome.
Weekly office hours
Bring your questions to our weekly virtual office hours, every Wednesday. Everyone is welcome.
Recent topics
Posted 17 hours 37 min ago by (izmeez) in Weekly Meetings
Posted 3 days 6 hours ago by (Jochen_K) in Requests and Feedback
Posted 1 week 20 hours ago by (spjsche) in Installation Questions
Posted 1 week 22 hours ago by (Terebinth) in How-To and Troubleshooting
Posted 1 week 2 days ago by (stpaultim) in How-To and Troubleshooting
Recent comments
Hi Jochen You could test https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/commerce_invoice_receipt which doesn't yet have a release, but may meet your needs when combined with other modules to generate...
Commerce modules
Setting up a multisite with multilingual support can definitely get a bit tricky with all those configurations. If you're looking for a way to keep things clean, I've found that using a quick...
Multisite for multilingual website
Start with basics: install modules for meta tags and XML sitemaps, set proper alt text on images, and keep URLs clean. Backdrop SEO is mostly about structure and content quality, not tricks.
How to Improve SEO Performance in Backdrop CMS
Most likely this is a problem with views_send.
Mail does not attach pdf and is sent unformatted after upgrade to php 8.1
Yes, this was solved in MIME mail: https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/mimemail/issues/52 The issue was that starting in php 8.1, you need \r\n to separate the header lines. Mimemail did...
Comments
No. There are no plans to make Composer mandatory and most people don't touch it for Backdrop sites. While there are a few things you can do in Bee that you can't do in the UI, you can easily manage your site updates almost entirely through the user interface and without Bee.
One exception, but you can do this by editing the files through cPanel File Manager, FTP or some other way is when
robots.txt,.htaccessorsettings.phphave changes that you need to apply. These are not replaced in the UI upgrade process (and won't be when the Bee upgrade command is complete) as it could override any custom settings.