After reading through much of the BackdropCMS.org site and watching many video-recorded presentations by Jen and Nate, I feel that I have a pretty good idea what the purpose of forking Drupal was, and the accomplishments so far. I can see that the target market for this software is me! I am a person that wants to build web sites for myself and a few small organizations with Low Code / No Code software. Moreover, I want to be able to do some more complex things with my web sites and I am not a fan of WordPress or its freemium contrib add-ons.
I have some exposure to Drupal from years ago. I started looking at Drupal around version 5. The advances introduced around the time of Drupal 6 were impressive. I saw how Drupal 7 made some big changes and the market adoption from site builders and contrib module developers was slow. It was slow, but it got where it needed to be and the mature D7 became great software.
The biggest issue I had with D7 was that I had to add dozens of contrib modules to get my site working and it took me too much expensive time to search/browse through thousands of contrib modules to find what I needed. It helped that Views, CTools, Token, Pathauto were sorted by popularity; but it still took too much time searching for things I didn't know I needed/wanted until after browsing through the available modules and reading many articles. Backdrop solves that problem for me by adding those needed modules to core. A more "out of the box" solution.
I only had an occasional need to help others build websites. All gratis. I am not a professional developer. It has been about a decade since I used Drupal and I am now in need of building a website, again. In fact I have plans to build multiple websites that need CMS features. The evolution to JAMstack, Vue, Nuxt, Strapi and so on is very interesting. Those who want to master HTML, CSS, SASS, SQL, Javascript, Typescript, Node, Vue (or React), Vuetify, Nuxt, Strapi and on and on; can play in the JAMstack space for their CMS needs. But there are many of us that need the ideal Low Code / No Code software (with a bit of paid-for coding help) to build great CMS-type sites on a budget. The requirements and skills I have point me to Backdrop.
Looking at the Drupal usage page ( https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal ) the data seem to vindicate Jen's and Nate's decision to fork D7 nearly a decade ago and spearhead Backdrop. The majority of existing Drupal websites are still using D7. D8+ is struggling in comparison. The oft-revised end of life for D7 speaks volumes. In fact, I just checked the CHANGELOG.txt at drupal.org ( https://www.drupal.org/CHANGELOG.txt ). Yikes! How can the leadership at Drupal urge owners of D7 websites to incur the high expense (dollars or labor) of upgrading to D10 when they have yet to do so?
I have seen Dries and others promoting D8+ as a headless CMS. In some ways it seems that Drupal has moved into a no-man's land between JAMstack and a powerful Low Code / No Code CMS like Backdrop. D10 seems to be a good fit for a shrinking segment of the market. Thank the gods that Nate and Jen had the clear vision, the generosity and the stamina to fork Drupal into Backdrop. What's more, a big thank you to Nate, Jen and all other contributors over the last 8 years for what you have accomplished.
This brings me to my questions about the state of Backdrop. Let me start with my impressions. My first impression when I installed 1.24 and started playing is that the "out of the box 'wow' factor" is mostly there. The default theme lacks any "wow" reaction, however. That seems to have carried over from Drupal. I notice that the jQuery version is very old and unsupported. I also notice that CKEditor is still version 4 and the end of life for that version is the end of this year. Since the Backdrop Roadmap shows that the 2-3 year major upgrade goal was too ambitious, what is the plan for upgrades to jQuery and CKEditor?
A few other bits of feedback: There wasn't a blog post announcement for 1.24. Also, the Backdrop.org site has a strange artifact of the drop down navigation menu items flashing down when it first loads.
I understand that open source projects like Backdrop need contributions from its community of users to survive and thrive. No software is truly free as in free beer. Someone had to create it and I will add value to it as I build my websites. Labor ain't free. Yet free as in free speech is priceless.
I would like to join in once I begin using the software and have the ability to contribute. Since this is "state of the union" season, could Jen and/or Nate provide a state of Backdrop post or presentation? I would especially like to know what the current challenges are and your focus for 1.25 and 1.26. What is the probability of a version 2 by Jan 2025?
Comments
Hi @stefano. Welcome to Backdrop. You are right that the blog post for 1.24 has not been written yet; it is reliant on volunteers and while it will happen, it may be a few more days to a week before it is published.
There are a few ideas for 1.25 but it is still a work in progress and the likely feature list is unlikely to be finalised until much closer to the time. It is possible to advocate for a particular feature request if it's something you want to see happen and that can increase the likelihood that someone will work on it.
I do recall some mention of menu flashing but I can't find the issue. My eyes don't have a high enough FPS to be able to spot it.
The best chance of seeing a kind State of Backdrop talk where the longer term roadmap is explored will be at the next Backdrop Live in March.
It will be great to have you involved as and when you feel able.