[kwlug-disc] OT: Drupal 7 Migration to Backdrop CMS

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 11:40 PM Ronald Barnes <ron at ronaldbarnes.ca> wrote:

> Khalid Baheyeldin wrote on 2022-11-21 18:26:
>
> > Despite Drupal 8 coming out, and then going into End Of Life after
> > Drupal 9 was released, there are still more active Drupal 7 sites (~
> > 439,000) than all of 8.x, 9.x and 10.x combined (~ 380,000).
>
> That seems rather damning with regards to the upgrade path.
>

One of things I did not like about Drupal 8 is that it is "enterprise".
That means
if you have a large development team, or can afford to hire an agency that
does migrations, you are good. For everyone else, specially small to medium
sites, that is not practical nor affordable.

That is where Backdrop CMS fits in ...
It is basically D7 + configuration in json files + a very cool layout
manager.


> Have given consideration to running "wget" on the sites and only
> exposing the resulting static files.
>

That is an idea that I toyed with, but it will preclude things like
commenting.

I wonder if I heard of them a year (or two?) ago, when the kerfuffle
> about some package being forcefully removed happened?  Something like
> colorBlah package had known vulnerabilities and no maintainers, so the
> plug was pulled, leaving lots of sites hosed.
>
> Was Backdrop born from that? Or gained exposure as they were offering to
> adopt the abandoned package?


No, Backdrop is way older than that. It borrowed file based configuration
from
D8 before D8 was released. So it is at least 8 years old, if not more.

I had a client migrate from D7 to Backdrop CMS, and they hired one of the
developers
of Backdrop to do the work. As usual, it is never a pure migration, but
also : what can
we improve, let us redesign that part, and that other part, and a new
theme, ...etc.

In parallel I moved 5 sites that I have to Backdrop CMS, with a default
theme (since
I hate front end development and CSS). If you do a proper rehearsal using a
copy of
the site, it should take no more than 2 hours to do the actual migration
per site.
The rehearsal is where you should discover what is not working, and what
has to be
re-done (e.g. Book module's settings need to be manually re-done for it to
take effect).
A few things will slip through, but the more thorough you are the less
surprises you
will have.
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