Survey: How did you come to Backdrop CMS?

I don't remember exactly how I found it either.  It was in early 2021 that I first tried it when looking for (a) a new platform for my website and (b) a new platform for the Drupal 7 sites I setup.

I also must have looked at it a few years earlier because I'd written myself a todo task to investigate it further; I only found this after I'd adopted it.

I'd been running Drupal 7 sites for several years, had figured out how to update with drush, and could just about apply patches, install dev versions of modules and even attempt fixes but all this was done by copying and pasting on my shared server hosting.

I'd spent too long trying to get a Drupal 8 site up and running, before deciding it was too complex and wouldn't be suitable for the type of clients I wanted to work with.

My first onboarding was suggesting a fix for an issue on Bootstrap light and asking for help on Zulip to submit a pull request as I'd never done one before.  Was a Friday night here in UK, but several people helped me go in the right direction and I've been part of the community ever since.  

I've been using Drupal since 6, and I've known about Backdrop since maybe when it was announced. I've only recently had the opportunity (and motivation!) to actually dive in. I support one site full time at my day job and given the cost of migrating it to D9 we've opened up the gates to look for alternatives. I'm in the early evaluation phase, figuring out how to run the upgrade process, evaluating how much breaks on the other side, what needs to be changed to work properly, etc.

Having limited resources and being fairly familiar with D7 ways of thinking I've been interested in Backdrop for a while—it makes perfect sense to me. But I've never much pushed for it, assuming most non-technical folks would hear "Backdrop" and assume it was some completely different system, a complete change from Drupal, or even a downgrade. I assumed it would be hard to explain the benefit of the system. Recent cost analysis has freed up thinking pretty quickly!

OK, let me share my experience with Backdrop:

First I make static sites, then a few with Wordpress. After that, I enjoyed working with Drupal 5, 6 and 7 for many years. Although the beginning was very difficult for me, I began to understand in very small part how to work with Drupal 5 after several months of intensive reading of manuals and textbooks. I timidly took the first steps. I gradually loved Drupal very much and gradually learned all the basics and worked with ease and pleasure. I welcomed Drupal 7 with joy and the wonderful new tools and I was even more eagerly awaiting Drupal 8.

I was impatiently installing Drupal 8 in early beta and ... I started to wonder and get more and more disappointed. For 1-2 years I wondered what to do, whether to study the new tools needed for Drupal 8 or look for another CMS. I read a lot of comments on the Internet with all kinds of oppinions and saw that I was not the only one disappointed, on the contrary, there were many disappointed ones.

In my country - Bulgaria - there was a very active forum for Drupal. I wrote a lot there too. Mainly to help beginners with Drupal. After the appearance of Drupal 8, this forum stopped, new publications stopped, and then its domain was closed, today there is no such forum.

So, while I was thinking and wondering which way to go, I read again the article about Drupal in Wikipedia. There I found suddenly and surprisingly a short new note that there is a Drupal fork - Backdrop CMS. (later on someone deleted this text from the Drupal wiki page).

I Immediately searched the Internet, found the Backdrop CMS site and wrote through the contact page that I was interested. Almost immediately I received a welcome response from Jen Lampton. I keep this letter, it was from 24.09.2015.

I started working with Backdrop, made the first installations, I had great pleasure, how my old knowledge of Drupal is not lost, with each new version I saw how the system strengthens, matures and develops.

Today, seven years later, I am confident that I made the right choice. Gradually, I converted all the old sites that I support to Backdrop, and I make all the new ones with Backdrop, of course. I can add nothing but to thank the wonderful and responsive community.

Note: I converted all old Drupal 6 and 7 sites with Backdrop by rebuilding them. I have successfully experimented (many times) on test sites with the automatic upgrade process from Drupal 7 to Backdrop, but I have never used it in a real site, I tried several times, but things went so badly that it was easier for me to make the site again than to solve problems.

Note 2. I believe that all the sites that I failed to upgrade through the automatic process from Drupal 7 to Backdrop are due to the incorrect way in which Drupal 7 sites were made by me - while researching and exploring Drupal I experimented with different (many hundreds) modules (perhaps some of which were also imperfect) and then deleted some of them without proper uninstallation - I experimented with this to make themes, custom templates, edit system menus, etc. and this probably led to errors in the automatic upgrade to Backdrop. I mention it because I guess I'm not the only one who made such mistakes and I guess automatic upgrades work on solid, proper and well-built Drupal 7 sites and this can lead to undue frustration for some new users.

Very similar story here.

I don't recall how I discovered Backdrop, but it was only a couple years ago.

Like amilenkov, I started building static sites in 2000, then later discovered Drupal and thought, "Holy cow, this is how website building should work!" So having built twenty or thirty websites over the years for myself and friends using Drupal 5, 6, and 7, I was eagerly embracing the new and improved D8.

Skiiiiddd... (insert record-skip sound here).

Somewhere along the line I started picking up on the fact that further development in D8 would require Composer. Well, it didn't take very many hours of unsuccessful attempts to install composer and use it, for me to realize that Drupal was no longer useful to me. Thus, D7's EOL forced me to look elsewhere, and—whaddyaknow?!?—somebody forked D7!

Hooray.

I like everything about Backdrop, its community, and its core developers. Your philosophy is well thought out, appropriately pragmatic, and smart.

Thanks, Backdrop!

I don’t build websites, I use the Drupal 7 API heavily because I developed and operate some custom modules. Because of Drupal 7 EOL, I started converting a custom module to Drupal 8. I saw that it was too much (expensive) work, so I looked for another solution. On a forum, someone mentioned the Backdrop, the fork of Drupal 7. Custom modules use some contrib modules. So I converted them to Backdrop. As a result, I became a member of the Backdrop's community. Community development was a new experience for me, which I really enjoyed. That’s why Backdrop has become my hobby. This hobby creates value.

Thanks to the community! :)

I needed a specialized website for work and I could not get immediate help from Stanford or SLAC webbers.  Without much knowledge, I was able to build a fairly large and sophisticated website using Drupal 7, only having to learn CSS.  Then Drupal 7 went on the terminal list and security became an issue.  I looked into Drupal 8/9 and asked why?  With a little searching I quickly found Backdrop, but was it legit?  Actually it turned out to be almost too good to be true; all the great aspects of Drupal 7 plus Layouts!  The community was responsive at the outset and I was able to set up a test website at Triplo and since the majority of modules had been ported, I realized this was a perfect solution - I had a way to move forward.  I built the new site from scratch. I was still missing a few key modules, so I hired some Backdroppers to port them.  Life is good.

I was working with Drupal 8/9 since years.

I realized shortly, that I'm busy while managing the system (99.5%), instead of content (0.5%). The complex structure and the fact, that more and more things and modules are missing or not working anymore with increased version number, leaded to boreness and upsets.

So the letters CMS became more and more the sense of "Crappy Mess System".

Even support was not available without hints for patches and the installation via drush and composer, which are in my eyes no part of a good CMS and a "user" should not be forced to use such development tools.

Then a requirement came up for managing different teams, with different content groups, which require different permissions related to groups, not users. All teams are mainly working on books. Seams really impossible to realize it on Drupal 9, without a deep grip into the money pot. But because it's for non-profit communities, the money pot does not exist.

As I begun to discuss it in a Drupal forum, another user ("Jaypan") gave me a hint to Backdrop ...

So I've tried and installed Backdrop 1.21.1.

My first impression was ---WOW--- just for the admin interface.

What in Drupal requires additional modules, is integrated to Backdrop by default.

And the best of all: I found Organic Groups working under Backdrop. Sure, some og_things are still buggy. But over all it's working much better than the alpha version on Drupal 9. 

My general impressions compared to Drupal 9:

• Excellent Integration of installable modules and themes
• Speed: 10 times faster than Drupal 9 on a Raspberry Pi as Testsystem ...
• Layouts for Blocks: fantastic !!!
• Usability: much more intuitive.
• And more ...

I just can say: "Goodby D9, im switching over."

I started using Drupal at the beginning of version 7.

I am a photo journalist and wanted a website to display my photography and write stories about the images, as well as provide content space and a unified homepage for several other contributors. Drupal seemed the best way to do this.

It was a steep learning curve, but I was very happy with the end result.

Upgrading to Drupal 8 was painful, and I essentially ended up doing it all by hand, one post at a time. All was ok after that. I toyed around with Composer, but did not want to use it. I am not a developer - just someone who wants to have a decent website.

Somewhere along the way, Drush stopped being an option for updating Drupal core. Huge time suck and pain point updating, never knowing if my site was going to go down in flames. (fortunately, it never did.)

Now I'm converting my site to Drupal 9 and reluctantly building a new site with Composer and just putting the content back piece by piece. So much to learn now and so many more complications: Composer, Twig, SCSS vs SASS, and a half dozen other programs I never heard of - and even creating a subtheme seems mostly (thus far) a manual process. I've spent more time updating my D8 site than I have creating content, and thinking Dropbox might be a way to make maintaining my site an easier process.

I'm still prodding along with D9, but just maybe, Backdrop ...

I started building static sites in 1999. 

I tried various e-commerce solutions but with my background being systems analysis found them lacking so never really went the e-commerce route.

I found a PHP framework called Interakt back in 2005 and used it for a few years then Adobe purchased it along with Macromedia and squashed it.

That's when I found Drupal 4.7 (?) and fell in love with the data-centric approach to design.  

I then adopted Drupal as my go-to, preferred solution... then D8 hit the shelves and I started to build using that, and what a disappointment. The speed, the lack of modules converted caused a lot of lost hours of development...

So I started looking for an alternative and came across an early Backdrop...  But for some reason, I never started using it.

I went back to D7 for a while then started to look at more alternatives... Joomla, Magento and, I really dislike saying so... WordPress...  and it looked like WP was going to be the solution... but I never liked the ecosystem, or the development process and I couldn't do what I wanted to do easily without more and more paid modules.

So I started looking for Drupal alternatives again and found Backdrop CMS again... and started using it a couple of years ago.

I've never looked back since and fingers crossed I won't need to :-) - Not if I can help it anyway lol.

 

I have a live site currently running on Drupal 8, but developing a local site using Drupal 9 and now Backdrop side-by-side.

I always found drush to be useful, but don't want to use learn or use Composer - though I have been on the local site for the bare minimum.

I like Backdrop and so far, it's doing everything I need the Drupal 9 site to do (and the out-of-the-box installation was a lot easier. I'm getting the sense that this may be a lot easier to maintain as a content creator who is not a developer.

Only thing I'm wondering is if this will still be a maintained system two or three years down the road. I guess there will be a better sense of this as we get closer to Drupal 7's EOL, currently set for November. 

Any thoughts?