You're not trapped: how to migrate out of Backdrop

With Drupal 7 EOL just a year away, over half a million of D7 sites will be looking for a new home.  As we're all aware, moving from Drupal 7 (or even earlier versions) to Drupal 8/9/10 is often a daunting experience.  It's typically much easier to move to Backdrop, but doing so is a political risk for many people.  Since D8/9/10 is officially supported by the same organizational infrastructure that is currently supporting Drupal 7, lots of site owners are worried about leaving that support behind, and are therefore hesitant to consider Backdrop.  What if something happens in the future that makes them wish they had moved to the Symfony/Twig-based Drupal platform?  FOMO might prevent them from trying Backdrop in the first place.

I believe we should try to allay these fears.  If people feel confident that they can move to Backdrop without being trapped, it will be easier to convince them to try it in the first place.  The more people try Backdrop, the less reason there will be to leave, so by making it easier to leave, we'll end up with more people staying.

The Drupal community has put considerable time and effort into developing migration paths from Drupal 7 to later versions.bbBecause Backdrop is so similar to Drupal 7, it should be easy to develop and maintain migration pathways to later versions of Drupal by building on this work.  Simply porting these tools to Backdrop should keep that path back to Drupal open, should it be needed.

As a bonus, we can take advantage of work that has been done to move from Drupal 7 to other platforms, like Wordpress or even proprietary systems like Contentful and Adobe Experience manager.  It's nice to know that paths to the exits are well-marked and maintained, even if you hope to never use them.

We want people to feel comfortable moving their sites to Backdrop.

Bring your ideas and opinions and let's talk about the possibilities.