Backdrop Pipeline Update

Block E - Slot 15

Slot 15: 10:00 am America/Los_Angeles - April 5, 2024

This past May, I sent an invitation to every organization and individual who had identified themselves on the backdrop Service Providers page that read like this:

Are you looking for more business? Then read on!

Since you are listed as a Backdrop service provider, we would like to extend an invitation to you to participate in a new program that will refer to you owners of Drupal 7 websites who are interested in moving their sites to Backdrop CMS.

You can learn more about it (and sign up, if you wish) here: https://backdropcms.org/d7-pipeline-signup

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Best regards,

The Backdrop Marketing Team

Providers that followed this link came to this page:

https://backdropcms.org/support/services

You are probably aware that Drupal 7 is scheduled to go EOL in November 2023. We think a lot of the sites that are running Drupal 7 would be interested in moving to Backdrop if they had some help with the upgrade, and so we want to do what we can to make it simpler for the owners of those sites to hire people to help with the process.

To facilitate this, we're setting up a referral service specifically focused on firms and individuals who are willing and enable to support upgrading existing sites from Drupal 7 to Backdrop.

Once we have a pool of available providers, we’ll advertise the availability of these services to Drupal 7 site owners in a variety of ways and point them to this form: https://backdropcms.org/d2b-conversion-request

Speaking of forms: Simply fill out the form below and we’ll add you to the list of providers. When a request for help comes in, we’ll send you information about the request, and if you’re interested, we’ll forward your contact info to the potential customer. That’s all we’re doing – it will be up to you to pitch the possible client, work out terms, arrange payment, and complete work. We just want to make the connection, and beyond that we’ll stay out of the way.

A good group of providers responded, and we seemed to be in business.

I form for incoming requests was set up:

https://backdropcms.org/d7-migration-help

Get Help For Your Drupal 7 to Backdrop Migration

Do you have a Drupal 7 site that you would like to have on a supported platform?

In 2013 the Drupal project decided to change, replace, retire and/or augment many of the technologies that formed the basis of Drupal distributions, and by extension the sites that were built on top of them.

Because of the difficulty of moving code to the new architecture, Drupal 7 sites have been very slow to migrate to new revisions. Drupal 8 was released in 2015, but seven years later there are still more Drupal 7 sites live on the web than there are sites built on top of the later versions:

(Source: https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal)

In contrast to Drupal 8/9/10+, Backdrop is mostly based on the same architecture that underpinned versions of Drupal prior to D8, and migration is considerably easier.

Drupal 7 was originally scheduled to reach EOL two years ago, in November of 2021.  This deadline has been extended twice, and is currently set for November of 2023.  While there is speculation that this deadline will be extended again, there is no guarantee of that.

Many site owners choose to migrate the sites to Backdrop themselves, or using an in-house team. The steps to do so are documented here:  Upgrading from Drupal 7

For various reasons (Lack of time, lack of in-house expertise, peace of mind) you may wish to engage an experienced Backdrop professional to handle the migration. To make this easier, you can fill in the form below with some basic steps, which we will deliver to a group of firms that have knowledge of and availability to handle migrations.