With about a week to spare before Drupal 7 reached EOL, I managed to rebuild a very large (6,000 pages-plus) and complicated D7 site in Backdrop. 

Here it is: https://steampunk-explorer.com/

My feedback is 99% positive. So first, thanks to the developers of the core CMS and the folks who ported the modules. Also to a few people who posted helpful answers in this forum when I ran into problems.

I don't know what I would have done without this CMS. Neither WordPress nor the later versions of Drupal were good options. I am not a professional developer. My background is on the editorial side, and my approach to building websites is to learn just what I need to get a project done. Because Backdrop is so similar to D7, the learning curve was minimal.

This was not a port, but a rebuild, but I was still able to use a lot of the old D7 site as a reference for building the new one.

Most of the glitches I encountered related to gaps in my own knowledge. I was up to speed on CSS as it existed about seven years ago, but I'm still getting my head around flexbox. There are some spacing and navigation issues I'd like to fix, but my first priority was getting the site up and running.

The one feature in Backdrop that caused me the most problems was CKEditor 5. It just seems extremely temperamental, though I've managed to work around the issues I encountered. I did learn that what appeared to be a bug was actually a feature: If you have multiple unordered lists with different classes, it collapses them all into a single class. My workaround is to set all fields that use unordered lists to Raw HTML.

One D7 module that didn't make it into Backdrop was SimpleAds, which I used for managing ads on the site. All of the advertising is locally hosted - I don't use any third-party adtech. Following a useful suggestion in this forum, I used Views to set up a series of advertising blocks. Each has multiple ads that rotate based on a random sort. However, I have no way to track performance of the ads - I can't tell how many people are viewing or (more importantly) clicking on them. If someone is aware of a module that would allow me to easy track clicks or taps on a specific piece of content, please let me know.

But all things considered, the CMS was a godsend, so thanks again to everyone who made this thing work.

Most helpful answers

Really good feedback. Thank you.  If you don't get along with CKEditor 5 you may want to try TinyMCE. I'm shifting most of the sites I manage onto it.

For SimpleAds you could add a request to https://github.com/backdrop-ops/contrib/issues or if you do not have a GitHub account and have no desire to get one (though one is useful if you want to raise issues for Backdrop or contributed modules) then someone can raise the request on your behalf. There is no guarantee but sometimes people port modules if there is enough interest.

Comments

Really good feedback. Thank you.  If you don't get along with CKEditor 5 you may want to try TinyMCE. I'm shifting most of the sites I manage onto it.

For SimpleAds you could add a request to https://github.com/backdrop-ops/contrib/issues or if you do not have a GitHub account and have no desire to get one (though one is useful if you want to raise issues for Backdrop or contributed modules) then someone can raise the request on your behalf. There is no guarantee but sometimes people port modules if there is enough interest.

I will check out TinyMCE. I'm not sure if SimpleAds is easily portable. In D7, it seemed to break at some point over the past year or so - it still served the ads but zeroed out all the stats. The Drupal page now says it's not supported in D7. The developer had trouble upgrading it to D8. At one point, I recall, he was charging for an updated version to recoup his time. But it looks like he found a sponsor because it's free in D10.

Great feedback. Love to see spreading the word.

@steveb510

but I'm still getting my head around flexbox

It's interesting you mention flex box.

My journey during the long pending d7 eol had taken me into css flex grid. Possibly, somewhat related to using the drupal zen theme and zen grids.

Without realizing it, when using backdrop it was using flex box, not flex grid. This caused me to stumble.

As I understand, 

they are both css constructs and flex box preceded flex grids allowing the latter to improve on the former. 

in backdrop it is handled in the core module layout.

It's like a puzzle of flex box, flex grid, zen grids, and layouts.