The University of Colorado chose Drupal over Backdrop. Why I'm glad we were wrong.
kreynen
Back in 2018 I was the Manager of Web Development for the University of Colorado's Web Express service. We had ~1000 D7 sites we needed to migrate to something else before the EoL. We seriously considered Backdrop, WordPress and many other solutions. As a team, we ported D7 modules to Backdrop. Launched Backdrop sites on Pantheon. I posed many times about why I personally thought Backdrop was a better fit for our use case than Drupal 8. I went so far as to wear a T-shirt at DrupalCon Nashville asking attendees to Change My View about D8 for our use case.
- This session will review the major issues we had with version 8 of Drupal for our use case
- Some of the CMS solutions we tried to replace Drupal with (both open source and commercial)
- How the Drupal community addressed most of the issues we had with Drupal 8 in version 9
- Why I think modern Drupal deployed with a modern build process is the right choice for ambitious marketing sites in 2022, but Backdrop is a more cost effective solution for most of the sites I've built for higher ed
- Why after helping to fund distribution packaging on Drupal.org and maintain the Packaging Allow List of 3rd party dependencies, I'm so excited about sunsetting that functionality
- How we leverage a modern build process with Pantheon's Auto Pilot to empower Ambitious Site Builders
- How the University of Colorado contributes back to Drupal to ensure the higher ed use case is well served
Back in 2018 I was the Manager of Web Development for the University of Colorado's Web Express service. We had ~1000 D7 sites we needed to migrate to something else before the EoL. We seriously considered Backdrop, WordPress and many other solutions. As a team, we ported D7 modules to Backdrop. Launched Backdrop sites on Pantheon. I posed many times about why I personally thought Backdrop was a better fit for our use case than Drupal 8. I went so far as to wear a T-shirt at DrupalCon Nashville asking attendees to Change My View about D8 for our use case.
- This session will review the major issues we had with version 8 of Drupal for our use case
- Some of the CMS solutions we tried to replace Drupal with (both open source and commercial)
- How the Drupal community addressed most of the issues we had with Drupal 8 in version 9
- Why I think modern Drupal deployed with a modern build process is the right choice for ambitious marketing sites in 2022, but Backdrop is a more cost effective solution for most of the sites I've built for higher ed
- Why after helping to fund distribution packaging on Drupal.org and maintain the Packaging Allow List of 3rd party dependencies, I'm so excited about sunsetting that functionality
- How we leverage a modern build process with Pantheon's Auto Pilot to empower Ambitious Site Builders
- How the University of Colorado contributes back to Drupal to ensure the higher ed use case is well served