I happen to be the founder of multiple not for profit organizations.
I also happen to be getting close to the end of my lifespan. As such, since I have been the primary individual responsible for designing our websites for the last 20+ years, I am trying to find one solid website program that will be able to host my primary non profit for many years into the future, after I am gone.
What I am looking for is a program that is easy enough to install and maintain that I can handle it, with my deteriorating mind as well as making it easy for our non expert volunteers to run, after I am gone.
The feature we need is a CMS that is designed by a large number of volunteers, instead of simply a handful of individuals, (which backdrop seems to fit this criteria) that has a forum built and maintained by multiple developers that has the capability to expand over the years in their ability to handle larger numbers of users and posts, AND a photo gallery that will be able to handle tens of thousands of images. The final and most difficult part will be a cms that can bridge with some type of genealogy or family tree program that will contain millions of gedcom files.
It would be great if the primary cms had the ability to conduct one search that would find words or phrases throughout the entire site, including the gedcom files, photo gallery, forum and cms, so the users could find certain information in one simple search instead of having to make multiple searches in each section.
Does anyone here see backdrop or some other cms as having the potential to fulfill these requirements?
I might also add that since I am the primary financial supporter of these organizations, I would prefer to utilize an open source cms, as much as possible, in order to allow my "financial trust account" to last as long as possible once I am gone.
Thanks for any input
FTW
Comments
The problem you are going to have with any CMS is that the more specific your requirements, the fewer number of people who can or will provide the software you need, and the less likely it will be free or open source. It is referred to as vertical software, and the fewer people in the market, the more expensive it is to maintain and cost. That is going to be the case no matter what CMS software you use.
The same is true for your Create Bridges post.
If your requirements can be more generalized, you will be more likely to get the software you need for free and/or open sourced. My thought process is that it might be possible to get mostly what you are looking for by making use of Apache Solr and existing Backdrop search modules, like Search API & Solr search. Those programs are used by a larger number of people, so they will be more maintained. However, I don't know if they have the ability to search files, and even if they do, they probably do not have the ability to search gedcom files.
There are also a few existing Drupal modules that might help and could potentially be converted for use in Backdrop, but they have not had a lot of maintenance for 2+ years:
You can probably get general software for searching files that is more used & maintained, but searching gedcom files will still likely require specific & fewer people to maintain that software, no matter which CMS you use.