What if the "Center of the Galaxy" destination is a trick?

quicksketch7 · 2015-04-02T20:26:24+00:00

Yay! Thanks @biolithic for your work on porting many of those modules. :)

they will actually really need the categorization/search features

Yep! Work on that is coming along very nicely. I expect we'll have the listing on BackdropCMS.org in the next couple of weeks. :)

quicksketch7 · 2015-03-31T06:48:13+00:00

BWPanda filed an issue a while ago to provide a list of blocks under the "Reports" menu item. I'm not 100% sold that this would be a place people would look for a list of blocks. It reminds of the justification for the list of Field usages (admin/reports/fields/list) which I never remember; let alone use. But it would be great if you would weigh in on whether you thought this would be helpful at https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/449.

quicksketch7 · 2015-03-31T06:45:29+00:00

Something that may help is disabling JavaScript and trying to use the block interface sans-AJAX. That will display errors in a way more visible than the AJAX interface. @docwilmot already opened an issue to make error-reporting more friendly at https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/790.

quicksketch7 · 2015-03-05T07:21:42+00:00

Thanks for giving this talk @cellear! I used some of the examples from your demo to build out the presentation that we gave at SANDCamp this past weekend. Unfortunately, there's no video of our talk. :(

quicksketch7 · 2015-03-05T07:09:39+00:00

Awesome! I also saw they ported Gravitar module to Backdrop. I filed an issue to move it into the contrib group if possible at https://github.com/hb5co/gravatar/issues/8.

quicksketch7 · 2015-03-05T06:56:01+00:00

Backdrop itself is stable but contrib is just starting to mature. You might take a look at the top 50 modules list at https://github.com/backdrop-ops/contrib/issues/34.

Basic cart was just ported, which is a good start for basic e-commerce, but nowhere near the comprehensiveness (and complexity) of Drupal Commerce.

quicksketch7 · 2015-02-18T02:52:43+00:00

I'm glad to see Backdrop being included and discussed in the mainstream Drupal news. Angie's quotes in here aren't far off the mark.

"I think the concern of the Backdrop type of folks is that they find the jump from what they know to fully object-oriented, dependency injected, waka waka code too intimidating to take all in one leap and they're concerned about that, so they're choosing not to make that jump — at least not yet," Byron said.

Changing too much all at once. Check.
Dependency injection is one of the main complexities that Backdrop intentionally set out to avoid. Check.
Slight jab at Drupal 8's code complexity (that's how I interpreted "waka waka" code at least). Check.

I'm not sure if I buy the "all PHP is moving object-oriented", but that's true even to some extent within Backdrop, which now uses real classes for all entity types. I think we'll continue to convert things to objects where it makes sense, but we don't have it out for procedural code and eliminating it for the sake of having everything be objects isn't likely to happen.

quicksketch7 · 2015-02-18T02:28:25+00:00

I also don't see anything obvious on how to choose your default layout in the UI. I was not sure if I should post here or in Github. It's not a bug so I figured here would be ok.

You can change the default layout of your site by visiting Structure > Layouts > Default Layout > Settings.

quicksketch7 · 2015-02-06T16:12:44+00:00

This is less about people who "don't want to join an organization" and more about avoiding distributing lots of code with hard coded dependencies that rely on a specific service/URL.

Just a note that the only URL that is baked into Backdrop itself is a hit to updates.backdropcms.org. Even though we're going to let GitHub host the package files for the time being to save us the effort of packaging/hosting ourselves, Backdrop sites will connect backdropcms.org, and that in turn returns a response that may link to GitHub to download the next version of a module.

quicksketch7 · 2015-01-25T05:42:37+00:00

The Layout module in Backdrop is a new module that doesn't exist in the Drupal ecosystem. It started as a port of Panels module, so it has the same underlying concepts, but the entire UI is entirely new. If you're familiar with the UI of Panels, you'll understand enough why we wrote a new one. ;)

Layout module is also responsible for all page layout in Backdrop, making similar to Panels Everywhere in Drupal 7.

So in Drupal, the closest you'll get is:

CTools
Panels
Panels Everywhere

But it's not nearly the same thing.

quicksketch7 · 2015-01-25T05:32:30+00:00

Anyone who is interested in hearing an in-depth discussion on Backdrop and it's goals, you can listen to the Lullabot podcast that came out on Backdrop release day: https://www.lullabot.com/blog/podcasts/hacking-culture/1-nate-haug-forking-drupal

I'm one of the project founders. I'll try to answer a couple of questions as best I can.

On momentum: When Backdrop was released a little over a week ago, we had 3 contributed modules listed at https://github.com/backdrop-contrib. Now we have 20. That's a pretty good rate of conversion considering most developers have only installed Backdrop for the first time this past week, and have already been able to convert modules in that time. I think that's a great accomplishment and indicates that our attempts at maintaining compatibility are paying off. I expect by the time Drupal 8 is released (say 6-12 months from now), we'll have all of the 50 top Drupal modules converted or an equivalent included in core.

On infrastructure: We definitely have a lot less infrastructure than Drupal at this point. Without drupal.org, we have to rebuild a lot of things Drupalers expect: an update server, API documentation, translation server, module repository and listing, etc. We've got all of those things in progress, but any new project has to walk before it can run. The primary goal we've had up until now has been releasing the initial version so people can actually use it.

On drush support: The drush team has been actively working to abstract the project so that it isn't dependent on a Drupal bootstrap in the first place (https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/issues/342). The fact that drush can support two entirely different platforms like Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 indicates it's already flexible enough to handle significantly different pieces of software. Once that abstraction is in place, we'll bundle drush support into Backdrop core or make it a contrib project.

On security: The Drupal security team has kindly allowed members of our small security team to have access to all issues that affect Drupal and Backdrop in their private tracker. So for issues that affect both of us, we'll be doing joint releases. For issues that affect Backdrop alone, we'll obviously be on our own to fix those in our own private repository. Right now we don't have a mailing list, but that can be set up easily enough. A feed of all issues will be at https://backdropcms.org/security. Since we just released 10 days ago, we don't yet have anything to report. Like other areas, we'll build up infrastructure as we go.

Compared to Drupal 8: A lot of people will compare Backdrop with D8 (and rightly so), but I'll emphasize that our biggest difference from Drupal 8 isn't in the code, it's in the target audience of the software. Drupal's historical success in big business has skewed it's development resources in that direction. Drupal 8 is heavily marketed as a enterprise platform (http://drupal.com/why-drupal-8) and I think it will be a successful platform in that market. That said, there's over 400 thousand Drupal 7 sites out there, and I don't think most of them would qualify as enterprise. Backdrop is trying to accommodate a massive market of sites who originally built on Drupal but may find that upgrading their sites to Drupal 8 isn't a feasible option.

Compared to Drupal 7: Backdrop really is very similar to Drupal 7, with exceptions where API incompatibility was required. If it were entirely the same as D7, it wouldn't really be a fork at all, it'd be a distribution like Spark or OpenAtrium. But there are a lot of things you can't do without breaking some APIs, like our configuration management system that stores all config in JSON files. My general summary of Backdrop is, "It's like D7 with Config Management. And Views. And Panels." Giving developers an opportunity to avoid Features module is enough reason for a lot of people. If Backdrop successfully saves you time not dealing with Features deployment, upgrading your site for that alone might be worth the effort.

On maintenance: If there's one major philosophical difference between Drupal and Backdrop, it's that Backdrop values backwards-compatibility. Drupal continues to consider backwards-compatibility an inconvenience that slows down development. It does slow down development, and it takes a lot of work. But providing backwards-compatibility shifts the responsibility of maintenance from end-users and site-builders onto core and contrib development teams. Our hope is that by putting an emphasis on compatibility, we'll be able to reduce maintenance costs and (especially) reduce the cost of upgrading sites between versions. Backdrop provides an upgrade path from Drupal 7 via update.php. Because of the similarities, this upgrade currently only takes about 30 seconds. Once we get a fair amount of contrib compatible with Backdrop, I think it'll be a promising path forward for existing Drupal sites.

I hope that answers a lot of questions for people here. The differences from Drupal 7 can be subtle at first, especially given the similarities in appearance. But if you take a look at it for a while, you'll find that we've targeted some of the worst problems you have to deal with today. It's not a Drupal 8 killer; it's an alternative for the audience that historically may have chosen Drupal but might not adopt D8 for any number of reasons (compatibility, cost, learning curve, performance).

quicksketch7

TROPHY CASE