Backdrop CMS has been around for ~10 years now and has understandably made an concerted effort to emphasize certain aspects of the project that can appeal greatly to Drupal 7 site owners: backwards compatibility with existing code, an upgrade path, the affordability of the Backdrop upgrade process compared to a migration to modern Drupal, Wordpress, or something else. Those backward-looking considerations are very important for site-owners that are coming from Drupal 7. But what about looking ahead? Are there reasons why you may do well to consider Backdrop for particular projects whether or not it's coming from Drupal 7?
TL;DR yes, there are.
In this session, we'll review how for certain types of projects, Backdrop makes an enormous amount of sense. We'll use some real world examples, and draw feature parallels and contrasts with modern Drupal. Some of the topics we'll cover include:
- flexibility, structure, and power: although simpler in many ways, Backdrop still provides Drupal's traditional power and flexibility. We'll go through a quick review of some of the similarities and differences between the two, including shared post-Drupal-7 features and Backdrop-specific improvements. A short comparison of Starshot/Drupal CMS as compared to Backdrop will be covered.
- complex projects: complex sites can be built quickly with Backdrop. I'll talk about some of the conversation at my agency around when a project is a good fit for Backdrop vs. Drupal or Wordpress. I'll review parts of a project I worked on with Penn State University's Undergraduate Education to show one example of how reusability can work in certain contexts (configuration, layouts, etc).
- simplicity: smaller projects, one-offs and DIY projects can benefit from the simplicity of developing with Backdrop to quickly spin up sites. Although Backdrop works well on large projects with complex workflows, the project also has a commitment to also stay friendly for site builders and simpler projects.
- future of Backdrop: how does the community, leadership and infrastructure resemble or differ from that of Drupal or other open source projects? How can we have confidence that the community (and project) will last into the future? Some thoughts about the future roadmap for Backdrop CMS. When to expect and what to expect from Backdrop 2.0?
- lower maintenance costs: if your project doesn't rely on them, pinning your site to the relatively fast-moving libraries that modern Drupal depends on can lock you into a series of non-trivial upgrades that can eat your budget more quickly than you'd like. Backdrop's stability and commitment to backwards compatibility can be seen in this context as a sort of LTS that reduces the total cost of ownership.
