Articles

Posted by herb on March 07, 2024

Drupal 7 had been around for more than a decade, but it will have its "end of life" January 2025. During the pandemic, 7 received a handful of extensions to give folks more time to upgrade, but it will receive no more. Within less than a year from now, your Drupal 7 site will stop receiving all updates and it will become a potential security risk. But even long-term support (LTS) will only support core and some of the more popular modules.

Posted by herb on July 24, 2020

Hi! Perhaps you got here because your Drupal 7 website is getting crusty and you are searching for alternatives. I'm going to show how to upgrade a website from Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS. Why should you trust us? I'm Herb van den Dool, a senior developer and project manager at Freeform Solutions. I've already got a few Drupal 7 (and Drupal 6) upgrades to Backdrop CMS knotched up. Some of those have been complicated websites integrated with CiviCRM and custom modules. At Freeform Solutions we many years of collective experience keeping valuable non-profit websites secure and well-maintained. We take you and your website needs seriously. Feel free to get a hold of us if you want our help.  You may have heard about Backdrop CMS which is a fork of Drupal 7. Perhaps "fork" is too simplistic a term. Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Backdrop is actually often easier than upgrading to Drupal 8. Backdrop is a good choice for non-profits and small businesses who have essential websites but don't always need to be on the cutting edge that is Drupal 8. Backdrop CMS has made a number of improvements to make the hard things that most people use easier. Backdrop also includes the most popular and useful modules in core, which almost everyone uses, such as Views, Pathauto and Token. Backdrop CMS is guided by the philosophy of making it easy for the 80% of users rather than cater to the advanced developer (a conscious change from Drupal 7). If you're unfamiliar with Backdrop you can take it for spin with this demo.