Goals for Backdrop CMS in 2020

Thank you for bringing this up:-) I just installed 1.15, Backdrop keeps getting better and better:-)

On the product side, I still would love to see better search support. I am also happy to help, although I am not a developer.

My professional background is in marketing, so I am also interested in spreading the word for Backdrop, and the positioning of Backdrop CMS in the market.

I just read the outreach meeting notes, and learned that some important points are not very clear yet: target groups, communication channels, reaching the right people etc.

I think an important part of the analysis should the current user base. There are folks who already discovered Backdrop, liked the product and started to use it. Marketing-wise, this persona type must be a part of the strategy 2020.

It would be very intersting to know more about those people. I am pretty sure that most of them have a Drupal background, and some other skills, preferences, etc.

In GoogleAds, the some of lowest hanging fruits are "Lookalikes": get me more people with the same profile, it's much more likely that they will convert than any other group we guess or we wish to convert. We could add them later, but first and foremost it's best to focus on the type of people who already "bought" the product.

I am not sure if this has been discussed already, I try to make it to the next outreach meeting on February 6th:-)

 

I have two very large drupal 7 based projects/systems.

In order to be able to port both of those to backdrop, I need a set of not yet ported Drupal 7 contributed modules.

My goal is to port one of those modules per month in 2020 so I can start 2021 with refactoring those systems and migrating them to backdrop and porting all the custom modules

Here is a goal that I would like to help the Backdrop CMS community work on this year. 

Goal: Better recruitment and support of volunteers and contributors

I think that the Backdrop community needs to do a better job of recruiting, tracking, and communicating with volunteers. We've been talking about installing a version of Backdrop with CiviCRM to manage volunteers and contributors. I'd like to help with that.I started a new topic for ideas.

I'd like to see us set a goal to recruit more volunteers and do a better job of supporting and communicating with our volunteers. Better retention. 

I would love ideas on what we can do to better support volunteers and contributors? How can we keep them active and happy? I started a new topic to discuss ideas for this.

My hope is that we can discuss and find ways to prioritize contributions.

For example, Drupal has methods of setting priorities for core development: there are 4 possible (mandatory!) tags on issues (critical, major, normal, minor).

There are also the "favorite of ..." tags which may give an idea of the perceived priorities of the main leaders of the organization.

We don't currently have an effective prioritization system. Devs pick their favorite issues and contribute PRs, then hope that someone else will review it, but due to our small group size, that someone else very likely has some other issue(s) which is his/her favorite. We can also advocate for an issue, that simply tells others which issues we prefer. We have milestones; if an issue is not concluded by a milestone, we simply bump it to a new milestone, or remove the milestone(!) regardless of how significant it may be.

None of this allows any group consensus or discussion on which of these may be critical to Backdrop's development and future.

Part of my concern for this state of affairs is very likely that I am not a developer. Maybe that's not how its done in open source communities, I don't know. But I hope we can adopt some practices to help with this.

Hello guys,

I really enjoy watching this community growing up.

I would like to say my opinion, even am only testing Backdrop CMS.

First there no need to compare BD community with the largest like Drupal, WordPress or joomla, Backdrop should focus what other small projects do like gravCMS, or even silverstripe.

Second a killer feature could be (in my opinion) a better media manager, the way backdrop use media is obsolete. I know Backdrop have no manpower to do something hard like this. :(

Third Something mention last UI meeting, there is no themes and the backdrop themes are not updated more than a year.

Fourth More tutorials how to do themes and modules, Laravel has a lot of tutorials in their site (https://laracasts.com/).

Fifth polylang, there so good support for other than English language. Typo3 is a king in Germany, the audience from Germany give a large community members who are not speaking English. A very good addition could be Arabic language.

I think many users (especially Drupal), Knowing Backdrop but the lack of themes and modules, turn them away. As external Backdrop CMS community seems like a dev programmers only community not for every day user.

About new BD member not only focus to Drupal 7 users, but also from other CMS like gravCMS, silverstripe or framework devs like laravel and also a new comer dev who's starting his dev life (University students). 

My 2 cents

Hello Backdrop,

Two years ago I wrote this for Drupal.org.  It'd take too much time to remove the Drupal Association issues from it or edit to change Drupal terms to Backdrop terms.  But the "unified, single ‘contribution’ system" hopefully has relevance to Backdrop.  Use, abuse as desired.

I would like to see Backdrop thrive as, my opinion, the last Drupal version that was ‘for the people’ was D7.

Best,
Michael

 

# # #
Michael-IDA at Internet Design Alliance commented 20 January 2018 at 12:44

Hi Mark,

Why would it leave a bad taste in your mouth? What I wrote is not a rant, it’s a simple summation of some of the problems the DA Community Liaison is going to have to deal with. [1]

Do you want Rachel blindsided because she doesn’t know the pre-history she’s going to have to face, and overcome, as part of her job?

I’m glad you’ve worked with her before, and I’m glad you have a positive experience with those interactions. We, the entire Drupal user base, need someone who isn’t in the ‘pocket’ on a single demographic of the Drupal user base, like has happened to the DA in the past.

# # #

Hi Rachel, @rachel_norfolk

Consider going bigger than just what this tiny issue is trying to achieve. The entire Drupal sphere (D.O, DA, D.Groups, etc,) would definitely be best served by a unified, single ‘contribution’ system.

D.O account (User)
Drupal Sphere (DS)
DA as clearing house (Bank)
User’s account at Bank (Account)

The DA basically has to be the ‘clearing house’ not some third party [2]. In simple terms:

• The DA is the Bank.
• The Bank gets 5% off the top of all deposits. This 5% is non-refundable, never shows up in the User’s Account, and the DA can spend it however it wishes.
• Any User can deposit money with the Bank.
• A mechanism is provided for the User to extract money from their Account.
• Only deposits are charged 5%, transfers in the Bank system are costless.

 

• Every element of everything in the DS has a ‘pay them from my Account’ link.
• Any User can then transfer as much money as they want to any other DS entity.

 

• Provide a formalized Bounty structure.
• Any User can define criteria for successful completion of their Bounty.
• Any DS entity can fulfill and claim any Bounty.

 

• Implement an automated advertisement system [3].
• Advertisements can only be paid for from an Account.
• Add a non-refundable balance line item to the User’s Account.
• Define, and openly publish, what the ‘profits’ and ‘costs’ are. [6]
• The profits are added to the User Account’s non-refundable balance line item. [4]
• Openly publish, and pay, to whom the ‘costs’ are going to.

I’m also sure I’ve missed multiple somethings that should be added, but once it’s a unified system, adding extra pieces won’t be significantly hard.

And seriously, lets do the math:

• No one’s going to bitch about the DA getting 5% off the top. [5]
• The DA is going to get more from the 5% than they’ll ever get from donations or memberships.

Okay, enough ‘ranting’ :)

Best Regards to All,
Michael

[1]
Ironically what I’m about to say could be considered a ‘rant,’ but let’s give it a shot anyway...

Please consider that people who you are considering writing a ‘rant,’ are most likely in the same boat I am. To whit, “I do not get paid to write ‘rants.’” They’re writing it to make the issue better, and they believe in the product enough they’re willing to cost themselves money to write it. tl:dr If unpleasant truths are presented, how is that a ‘rant?’

[2]
We being open source software, not being able to role our own solution is kinda heinous. Besides which we already have two different e-commerce solutions for Drupal...

[3]
Real world, not something like was presented in 2015 (see prior link).

[4]
Why? Openness and transparency. They paid the money in, they should get to determine where it gets spent.

[5]
Again, of deposits only. If applied to transfers, the whole system will never be used, as it then becomes an egregious money grub.

[6]
While the costs of serving ads is fairly negligible, they do represent a cost to the server, as such they need to be identified and distributed transparently.

Edit: Clean up formatting. Add [6].