Design and User Experience

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.

The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a standardized document used to describe how well a digital product meets accessibility standards such as WCAG. It’s commonly required by government agencies and large institutions, but increasingly affects smaller teams and open-source projects as well. 

One of our community members shared an article (link below) about Dashboards and using them to help give editors actionable, real time (mostly) insights on their site content.

Backdrop has quite a flexible Dashboard system but there is a module to provide advanced options (link below).

This is an opportunity to explore what people in the community are doing with dashboards, and what modules or Views can help.

With the recent core commit to allow specifying Layout types, the next Backdrop release will better support the development of Layout Paragraphs that is underway. We've reviewed the status of this work at a previous Backdrop Live, but it makes sense to give an update on where things stand in preparation for the next Backdrop core release and the 2.x branch of Paragraphs that will follow.

I've previously ported Gin to provide a modern admin theme to Backdrop -- and have been working behind the scenes to provide a new base theme for front end development, which I'm aiming to unveil at Backdrop Live. I'd like to get feedback and demonstrate:

• how it makes component-based theming simpler in Backdrop
• use of CSS custom properties
• how to sub-theme it simply

Many universities are adopting Backdrop CMS for various reasons, with budget efficiency and flexibility being key factors. As financial and structural considerations become increasingly important, let's explore the features that can make the CampusDrop platform a strong choice for educational institutions (K-12, community colleges, and universities). We'll discuss flexible layouts with Layout Paragraphs, customizable content types, preset views, and display options, among other capabilities designed to meet the unique needs of educational organizations.

I returned from Drupalcon Atlanta a few days ago, and there were MANY things I learned about there that may impact various aspects of Backdrop.  Let's talk about them.

We recently had our first regular Documentation meeting and one of the main areas of focus was looking at how people find the information they are looking for on our documentation site.  We started to talk about how we could improve the home page and create "pathways" for people to easily find what they need based on what they are doing.

What would help you find the documentation you need?

What gaps are there in the documentation and who can write the content to fill the gaps? 

Review of some of the demonstrated use cases for Higher Ed:

• Research Apps
• Upgrades from D7
• Custom workflow applications
• Unified theme and configuration system for multiple subdomains

Conversation, questions, and discussions with the group.

The Gin admin theme has been ported (is being ported) to Backdrop from modern Drupal, and I'm curious if people have any thoughts about the future. This is an open conversation for people who love Gin, don't like Gin, or don't even know about Gin.