One-month retrospective on Backdrop CMS

Exactly one month ago, we made the final release tag on Backdrop CMS 1.0.0. Backdrop has been the effort of more than 50 contributors over the span of 16 months, and I am positively thrilled with the product that we've delivered. Now that things have calmed down a little bit, I'd like to recap and check on the progress we've made.

Backdrop is an easy step from Drupal

The decision to fork Drupal was brewing over months of deliberation. It was born from frustration with the difficulty and complexity we were experiencing while working on Drupal 8. The Drupal community was then, and is now, working as hard as possible to make the transition from Drupal 7 easier, including great tools like the Drupal Console and the Drupal Module Upgrader. But tools do not reduce the overall complexity, and I think that ultimately all developers will need to invest a significant amount of time adapting to the architecture in Drupal 8... or not, which is where Backdrop comes in.

Backdrop provides functionality similar to Drupal 8 while maintaining the fundamental architecture of Drupal. If you've done any amount of Drupal development, shifting that knowledge to Backdrop is trivial. Although there are a number of changes from Drupal 7, they are all fairly easy to understand replacements. Backdrop also provides an upgrade path from Drupal 7, which runs surprisingly quick. Even with sites that have thousands of nodes, terms, and comments, the upgrade through update.php runs in seconds. Even the views that are stored in the database are upgraded to the built-in version provided by Backdrop.

Backdrop has great momentum

When Backdrop 1.0.0 was released, we had a total of 3 projects in the Backdrop Contributed Project Repository. Now we have over 45! That's an amazing rate of conversion. Although only a few of these projects are completely ready for production, I find it exciting that most of the authors that joined the contrib group didn't even use Backdrop before its release. That means that developers have been able to pick up the fundamental changes from Drupal 7 and port their modules in a startlingly short amount of time.

Infrastructure is building up

Backdrop has been using GitHub for issue and code management, but that's only a
small part of the infrastructure necessary to support such a large project. The infrastructure at drupal.org has been developing semi-organically for more than a decade; so while it may take a while for Backdrop to provide all the services Drupal developers expect, we're making a lot of progress:

• Documentation: Backdrop launched an all-new API Website that is building up a steady stream of new documentation.
• Update Status and Servers: Backdrop already includes an Update Status module (same as Drupal 7), but the update server to which it connects hasn't been completed yet. After the main BackdropCMS.org site itself gets upgraded, existing sites will start being notified of updates.
• Contrib Repository: Although it's great having so many contributed projects, browsing them on GitHub has already become difficult. Repositories are sorted by
  activity, there's no categorization, and different types of projects (themes, modules, and layouts) are all mixed together in one big list. Within the next few months, we'll see the completion of a full project directory on the main site that lists all contributed projects in a way that it is easier to search and navigate.
• Drush Support: Many Drupal developers would have a hard time maintaining their site without Drush, and though Drush does not yet work with Backdrop, upcoming changes in the Drush architecture should allow Backdrop to integrate with Drush to provide compatibility and specialized commands to integrate with Backdrop's new sub-systems.

Collaboration is crucial

Although Backdrop doesn't share the same name as Drupal, we still have the same roots and a lot of the same code. This means that when we find areas that can improve Backdrop, we're finding opportunities to improve Drupal at the same time. For example, I recently filed an issue to improve the parsing of .info files that turned up while profiling Backdrop, but clearly applied to Drupal as well. And although security releases are rarely a cause for celebration, last week we saw the first joint-release to fix problems in both systems at the same time, including Drupal's SA-CONTRIB-2015-039 and Backdrop's SA-CORE-2015-001. Each new release of Drupal that comes out, the Backdrop team re-reviews and re-applies the same patches, sometimes resulting in finding issues that slipped through into Drupal. It's a great opportunity to make the software better for everyone.

And gosh darn it...

People seem to really like Backdrop. The snappy page loads, the new layout system, configuration management tools, the administrative toolbar, updated libraries, trimmed down core... there is a lot to like. Check out the Top 6 Reasons to Use Backdrop on the project homepage. If you haven't tried it out, you can spin up an instance on Pantheon in just a few minutes, or just download and set it up on any PHP 5.3+ server.