Drupal and Backdrop CMS

Here on England’s south coast, a group of volunteers has been tending Heene Cemetery, a closed Victorian Cemetery (1873–1977). They have been writing up the history of those buried there, and physically maintaining what had previously been old meadowland in order to promote biodiversity in what is now also a Sussex Local Wildlife Site. A citizen science species surveying and recording project there is ongoing. A WordPress website had been storing the accumulated data and presenting it to the world.

With Backdrop CMS being a fork of Drupal, you could be forgiven for thinking that everything in Backdrop will be similar to everything in Drupal 7. It mostly is - and that makes it a delight to work in if you are familiar with Drupal 7. Views is there after all - and in core, so what could go wrong?

I have written before of my love affair with Drupal 7 and, separately, of my anxiety about Drupal 8. Drupal 7’s abandon-ship, event-horizon end-of-life looms on November 2021 and, although this is long enough away to do something about for a single website, I decided earlier this year to crack on and address this matter. Here is what I learnt.

For those for whom web standards matter, the devil is always in the detail. The content-management system Drupal throws this at us by the bucket load. No doubt other CMSs do the same. Fortunately, Drupal (both versions 7 and 8) comes up with its own solution to the problem.

Software evolves, updates are released and we all tread the moving pavement. So it is even with open-source software projects, such as Drupal and Wordpress. There are few exemptions. To Benjamin Franklin’s death and taxes, we should these days add software updates. And why not? Software projects are complicated and bugs slip out alongside improved functionality. So there is an inevitable iteration of minor and major releases. Minor releases, such as from Drupal 7.1 to Drupal 7.2, are usually evolutionary.