Keymaster & Gatekeeper: A Developer-Friendly Approach to Secrets Management

Managing API keys, credentials, and other secrets across multiple websites can quickly become a headache. What happens when a credential needs to be rotated? How do you securely share credentials across sites without duplicating them everywhere? And how can applications access external services without exposing the underlying keys?

Keymaster and Gatekeeper are two open-source projects I'm building to address these challenges.

AI in Backdrop CMS: Building with the Backdrop AI Modules

A tour of the new ai module family for Backdrop CMS, now in backdrop-contrib. The core ai module gives Backdrop one API for chat, embeddings, moderation and
structured decisions. Separate provider modules connect it to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, AWS Bedrock, Ollama and others, so a site can switch models
without rewriting code. On top of that core sit modules for:

Structured Flexibility - Paragraphs

Many site builder tools offer users the ability to format any page in any way with videos, text, images all arranged however. The trade-off here is structure with all information stored in one place, making exporting as well as re-use much harder.

Backdrop offers several ways of structuring content but one of the most popular ways is "Paragraphs". Paragraph types can be defined with any combination of fields and presented in the usual flexible ways.

Drop Suites - Backdrop CMS Contact Manager

I've been working on my own Contact Manager for Backdrop, built with AI assistance. I've personally been using it heavily since the last Backdrop LIVE, when I gave an initial demo. I'm close to releasing some parts of it for contrib distribution, hopefully by the time we have this discussion. 

I'd like to give a demo of Drop Suites and if anyone is interested I can talk about the development process on a project like this. 

Beyond the CMS: Building Commercial Applications with Backdrop

How far can we really push Backdrop beyond being "just" a CMS? D10/11 is thought of as being "for enterprise users," but what about Backdrop?

For example, my company has built two commercial B2B SaaS applications on Backdrop: a higher-education CRM and a faculty activity reporting system. Both serve hundreds of users and manage thousands of records, with integrations for institutional single sign-on, email, SMS, and other external services; much more than just managing web pages.

Closing session

This is a time for reflection on what we have learned at Backdrop LIVE, what we plan to do with our new found knowledge/experiences, and where we are headed as an opensource community. 

We welcome everyone to participate and share your Backdrop LIVE experiences.

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