Hi,
I heard about Backdrop and I like the idea of keeping a "lightweight" Drupal in live for small to medium scaled projects. For me it would be essential that this lightweight Drupal version will keep up with Drupal 8 and future Drupal versions for more flexibility: when small or medium scaled projects grow it would be a big argument for this lightweight Drupal project like Backdrop as it would make the up-scaling more easy (in my fantasy - maybe not really true).
My question: What is your future plan with Backdrop keeping this idea in mind? Will you develop Backdrop in a complete indepdendent way with just the starting code base coming from Drupal 7 or will you keep conntected to Drupal to make such a upscaling to Drupal 8 possible?
Best,
Tobias
Comments
Technically speaking I dont see any possibility of keeping Backdrop "compatible" with D8 since we cannot know where theyre heading, and cannot dedicate our efforts to keep looking into their plans, and coding to match, etc. I don't think that sounds feasible.
Eventually, I believe the paths will split, since the codebase is so different now, and the philosophies are also drifting apart. So far we've attempted to track D7 changes, but when D7 is sidelined, I dont imagine there will be much left in common.
My opinion.
D8 is not compatible with D7, so if you are preparing for the possibility of having your site grow too much in complexity and hoping that your exit plan would be to migrate to D8 when that happens, then I think you should reconsider because for a complex website there is no such a thing as an upgrade to D8 from any platform, not even D7.
This recommendation comes from having tried this myself. A clean upgrade from D6 to D8 with a website of medium complexity is impossible. The migration modules provided by Drupal are underdeveloped and inconsistent, the modules that are supposed to have upgrade paths are buggy, etc. Content types won't port correctly (some not at all), or many fields will have their data incomplete or mangled, workflows can't migrate, etc. Then the prospect of building your own migration tool is a costly idea because D8 is a completely different platform in terms of APIs and underlying technologies, so unless you already have the knowledge require for the new infrastructure, then you have to account learning the new technologies before attempting to build your own import process.
In short, aside from very simple sites, D8 is not a direct upgrade to anything. My best recommendation is to assume that going into D8 means rebuilding. But one step before that, I don't think there are many projects for which D7/Backdrop would be fine now but only D8 would do in the future. If D7/Backdrop is fine for you now, chances are it will continue to be fine as you grow with it.