Providing a Soft Landing for Drupal 7 Site Owners

TIM ERICKSON:
And say, welcome to those, Oh, yeah, It's going, welcome to those of you who viewing the video of the session. We did go through a round of introductions before we opened it up, but we're gonna do a short presentation and then we may turn off the recording again and have some more discussion. I introduced myself already, but if you wanna find me on Mastodon, that's where I am and you can follow my drone photos. I took this one last night by the lake. So, I'm gonna skip over the rest of the introduction and Simplo is a project of my company where we do backdrop, where people can spin up backdrop sites. Irina introduced herself. So, this was sort of my original idea for this session. And again, we may deviate from it a little bit to talk about the Drupal seven soft landing initiative, talk a little bit about how you decide. So, the Drupal seven Soft Landing initiative is just about helping people get off of Drupal seven, so wherever they go. It's not specifically about background, but in my presentation I'm certainly prepared to talk to you a little bit about like where backdrop works well and where it doesn't.

My agency does and Irina's does as well, we've moved some clients to backdrop and some clients to Drupal 10. So we're, you know, we go both directions. We wanted to talk a little bit about the tools and resources that are available to you, whichever route you plan to go and then to talk, you know, again, this was sort of raised with my backdrop hat on, how can we collaborate with the Drupal community? But whatever. And we've sort of answered this already, I think, which is, you know, how many of you are still working with Drupal seven sites and it sounds like quite a few people are in the room, although I don't know if anybody, well we maybe talked about some personal sites that just, you know, one of my questions is 'cause a lot of us, I had a phone call yesterday here at mid camp from somebody who I've talked to a few times over the last few months. It's a small husband and wife team who have a business. They've been using Drupal since probably Drupal six and their business is kind of a directory of sorts.

The pandemic's been a rough time for them, they don't have a lot of resources right now, they're worried about the Drupal seven end of life. She called me up and she said I know that Drupal seven end of life is in 2025 and I said, I'm sorry, I think I have some bad news for you, that it's not that far off, although we're not sure it could be extended, but technically it's this year. And she's literally, I think, trying to think about how long, I think the tone of her voice pretty much said that when she's not sure that she can afford to move into a new site. So, it's like, how long can I keep this site open? That's what, you know, kind of what she's getting from me, how can I how long can I keep this alive safely before I possibly have to close my business? 'Cause my business depends on this and I just don't have the budget to upgrade. And those are, you know, some of us have dealt with those people. There are still almost half, it's getting lower. This chart, I think, was from three months ago, but almost half of the Drupal sites out there are still on Drupal seven.

I already mentioned that the Drupal seven soft landing, that the title came from an article that I wrote about a year ago in which I said, you know, I'm happy that Drupal nine exists. I wish it a long and prosperous life, but my commitment is really to those small organizations that sometimes feel like Drupal is left behind and I want to figure out ways to help them. And that's why I'm so passionate about my involvement in the Drupal community or in the backdrop community. My involvement there is very much about the people that just aren't going to be served by backdrop or Drupal 10 and how do we serve them. And I'm concerned about them because I would, you know, if I were coming to Drupal today, I wouldn't come to Drupal today in the situation I was when I started Drupal seven, Drupal seven was a tool for me that I could get into as a site builder and do a lot of things with. And I was not a developer, a programmer, I was not super familiar in the command line. And you know, I think Drupal 10 would have scared me away very quickly and I would never have stuck around.

But Drupal seven was a tool that I embraced and I'm here 10 years later very active. This is becoming less of a big deal, the distance, but Irina is gonna talk to you later about the family. And when Greece said this last summer that, you know, backdrop was part of the family, that was a big deal for some of us 'cause we haven't always looked at it that way or the feeling it's been a little unsure. Anyways, we're moving forward. Irina started the Drupal seven Soft Landing initiative, which is basically to ensure that Drupal seven site owners aren't left behind and that they have the resources to prepare for what's next. I'm hesitant here, we're gonna come back and talk about that. So, I had some slides here about how we make decisions about Backprop versus Drupal. But Irina, at this point, I'm gonna ask you, should we talk a little bit more about the initiative first? And do you wanna jump up and do that? You know, go back and...

IRINA:
No, let's finish your slides and then we can hold the discussion.

TIM ERICKSON:
Well, I think the main value of mine might be talking about what the difference is. So, should we continue those? OK. These are some of the, and please, Irina, do jump in and tell me if you have other thoughts. These are the, you know, when I'm a client comes to me and wants to upgrade their Drupal seven site and they're looking for advice, these are the things that I'm considering in terms of deciding whether or not they're a Drupal nine, 10 candidate or a backdrop candidate. I'm gonna be up front, I like working with backdrop better than I do Drupal nine, 10. On the other hand, I have some developers that I work with who are very happy and they love Drupal 10, so we can easily go either way and I'm happy with that. First of all, budget, the more expensive to Drupal 10 upgrades, it's just cheaper and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. The complexity of the project and this one actually cuts in different directions. The complexity of the project, depending on the amount of custom code, may lead you towards Drupal 10 or backdrop.

Again, I'll mention the Stanford example because that's a really interesting one. What your maintenance budget is, I'm hearing from a lot of folks with Drupal 10 sites that just ongoing maintenance costs are a lot more. The need for specific modules, I just am in the final stages of a big like six month Drupal seven to Drupal nine upgrade that the primary reason, I probably would have went Drupal anyways, but the biggest reason was they use domain access and we don't have that. We've ported a lot of modules to back up from Drupal, but we don't have the domain access module and I did not care to take that on, it's a big suite of modules that some modules can be ported in an hour. Domain access, this I think is probably a month long project or, you know. because it's not just one module. Commerce would be another one depending, we have uber cart for background but we don't have the commerce module. If you need the commerce module, that's not gonna be an easy lift. And the other just context, one of the backdrops or one of the Drupal seven sites that while I did a university site that we actually we built it new and we probably would have built it in backdrop except for this client was at the University of Minnesota, where there's just thousands of Drupal 10 sites and it felt a little irresponsible of me to build it in backdrop in an environment where there's just so much support for Drupal 10.

And I wasn't aware of any other backdrop sites there. So, I felt like in that context kind of led me in that direction. So, those are some of the kind of criteria we choose.

IRINA:
OK.

TIM ERICKSON:
You wanna jump in?

IRINA:
Yeah, this is a good place. Can we go back to the page for initiative?

TIM ERICKSON:
Sure.

IRINA:
So, on the second page on the website. So, my first big article was posted on Pantheon. I can post that the full thing on drupal.work because drupal.work is not vendor-specific. So, this is actually, there are two articles that will walk you through the process of, if you scroll down, I have somewhere there a couple of things that are primary to people that we've work with. Stanford University, my most work was with Stanford and there's a lot of Drupal nine and I think everything is Drupal nine that has been migrated to a huge Drupal nine community. But the two major sites that were moved to backdrop because they were more cost efficient and there were big articles. They work with Adam Group and it was extremely successful. So, in this article I have a slightly different decision tree that starts with, does your Drupal seven site work well for you? And this is the key question because if your Drupal seven site is like eeh, then you're looking at the whole new perspective, you're migrating and you're finding the right system.

At least half of the sites that are still in Drupal seven are there because they work very well, they are great. This is, you know, due to Corolla, whatever it was, the model where I don't want to change it, I want to keep it running as long as I can. My husband still drives Toyota Previa 93, and it still works because it's a very good car. So, if the first step in Decision tree, if your Drupal seven site works very well for you, what do I do then? If it doesn't, you're looking migration is a different conversation. If it does work well for this is where you're looking at, OK, what do I have there? Is it more of a custom code that I need to put, or is it more on configuration or is it theming, what are my changes? And that guides you, if you scroll down a little bit, there is a decision tree. This is comparison between Drupal nine and backdrop CMS. So, you can see what's the same and what's different. But there are a lot of things that are exactly the same, like content types, UI, taxonomies.

There are some, the major differences is like Drupal, I call it Drupal with composer, so it's a very different backend. This is how you upgrade sites, how you run your DevOps and this is where composer can be terrific tool, wonderful tool. It catches your missing libraries, it doesn't allow you to mix and match, so you end up with a hug list of red errors on your site once you launched it. But at the same time, if you don't have the toolset to run composer, then you don't know, what do I do, right? Also, the like number of sites that you're running might be important. Like if you want kind of distribution of sites at one store or if you have one unique site, then you need slightly different toolset. You don't need to run updates on 35 sites, you just need to update your one site and you don't have to consider how long does it take, whether it takes five minutes or an hour, it doesn't matter, if you're upgrading 30 sites, it's a huge difference. So, these are all the factors that play into your decision tree.

And in this article, I wanted to put in writing things that I know can be used both for upgrading to either backdrop or Drupal 10. For those who are here who are looking for tools to make migrations to Drupal 10 easier, I would say look at the feeds module number one, because that takes out your extremely exciting learning curve of migrate system. There's also one click upgrade. If you have very clean site, you can do a one click upgrade, but then you have to have very clean site. And we also built before COVID, we started building a module called (UNKNOWN) Migrate, which is UI on top of migrate system, but we don't have large company that could pick it up and make it work. Maybe someday it will come, but not today. So, this are about decision making tool.

TIM ERICKSON:
If I go back to the presentation, I'm not gonna stick to it too closely, but I wanna mention the Stanford. We have to at least mention this. This was a big deal for backdrop was when the university, the Stanford University, made a decision to move two very complex, heavily used websites to backdrop, which to a lot of people was counterintuitive, that these were very complex sites and they have there are some great articles and they did some great presentations. If you want to hear from them why they did it and how they did it, just Google the Stanford Drupal seven backdrop upgrade. But there again, most most people are saying, well, we're moving our simple sites to backdrop just 'cause that makes sense. The complex sites go to Drupal, but in a lot of those cases it's because there's major changes if you're going to Drupal 10. If you're gonna redesign your site, if you're going to reconfigure it, you know, moving to Drupal 10 might make sense. This was a site that was under active development.

They were happy with what they had, they didn't want to redo it. If anything, they were in the process of adding new features to their Drupal seven site. They had a lot of custom code and they didn't want to have to rewrite all of their code, they estimate that they saved, maybe I have another slide with it, but they estimate they saved several hundred thousand dollars by sticking with Backprop because they were able to refactor their code rather than rewrite it and it would have taken them much longer. And they have done Drupal 10 upgrades so they know what the process is and they feel like they had very good estimates in terms of what it would have taken to move these sites to Drupal 10 or would have been Drupal nine at the time. And they chose backdrop and they've been very happy with it. So, very sort of an interesting case study where the complexity led in a different direction than you might have expected. So. I don't know if I had anything else in my presentation that I wanna focus on.

Well, I want to at least mention the fact, because it may not be clear to everybody that there is an upgrade path to backdrop. So, that's one of the reasons we talked about it. And Irina has the one click upgrades to Drupal 10 and backdrop. In theory with a Drupal seven site, you can set up your backdrop site and import the database into it and run the upgrade and it might work, sort of.

SPEAKER:
It's worked for me.

TIM ERICKSON:
A lot of your content, you know, a lot of your content types and things report neatly, a lot of your views will, but some things don't. Your theme isn't gonna work, right? So, one of the big things, I did a pretty big, a relatively complicated, I did a nonprofit website that had thousands, you know, like thousands if not tens of thousands of notes. So, it wasn't a complicated site, but it was a site with a lot of content and probably 12 content types. And we ran the upgrade process, in an afternoon we had all of the content migrated into backdrop. The next three months was redesigning, giving them a new theme and basically building new features for them once they got into backdrop. But you know, we had their content and content types and views all working very quickly.

SPEAKER:
Does that include media? Yes. Oh.

TIM ERICKSON:
OK.

IRINA:
For me, it did migrate.

SPEAKER:
OK.

IRINA:
It's not like Drupal, It's different than Drupal nine media module. Yeah, but the media library migrated for me. And the beauty is because it's an upgrade, it's not a migration, so basically your databases is placed, your file system is in place, your parts are in place and your configuration is in place. So, what you're doing is you are upgrading. Please don't quote me on the code-related statements, but you're making some changes in the code and the database and you're moving configuration out of your database into the code. And it is exactly same site, it's not a migration to something different, which can be good or it can be bad. For example, on one of our sites we had, I think, 10 gigabytes of files because on every page where people wanted an image, they attached three megabyte or five, I don't remember, and I have 145 images that are exactly the same and each is huge. So, this is example where you would want to do the cleanup. But if you have a better (UNKNOWN) site that works for you, works for you well, well, the files are in place, links are in place.

SPEAKER:
So, I'll say that the file structure will import correctly, but I'm not sure that the media module, there's a specific media module and that is referring to it's using its own code codification of how it puts those in it. That might not necessarily. So, I'll also piggyback on Tim's comment and say that for lots of typical Drupal installations, the migration path from Drupal seven to Drupal nine or Drupal seven to backdrop works, but there are edge cases and modules that don't work. Also in lots of Drupal seven websites there are custom code that has been added that may take you off of typical migration so that you'll finish your migration and then you'll maybe look at a content type and see, oh, my images are not in the right place. There might be some part of that migration that didn't pick up those customizations that was made on your website that will have to be fixed. But the idea is that the backbone of backdrop and Drupal and Drupal nine are the same. So, that content types are still content types, fields are still fields and your content and files will go from one system.

TIM ERICKSON:
I had a really important point to make and I forgot. Yeah. Any other questions? You know, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER:
Yeah. So, moving to backdrop, right?

TIM ERICKSON:
Sure.

SPEAKER:
So, themes completely different or what's the workflow there?

TIM ERICKSON:
Sure. And that reminds me of the point I was to make.

SPEAKER:
OK. So glad I could do that.

TIM ERICKSON:
And like for some of you that are fairly new to this, like what is the difference? So basically backdrop we often refer to as a fork of Drupal seven. Irina would argue that Drupal eight is a fork of Drupal seven because it's very different, right?

IRINA:
It's a little bit more fork, I would say, because I can call it Drupal spoon because there is a project Drupal spoon, but...

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah. If you're familiar like writing code for Drupal seven and working with Drupal seven, you're gonna feel very at home in backdrop. It's a fork of the code base, but we did bring in some of the features from Drupal eight. We brought in configuration management, we brought in whatever the other... CKeditor in core.

IRINA:
If you want to put this square thing called table 4x4, this is what's very important to me to highlight at one glance. Configuration management CKeditor Import and Media library, like a click it installs, it's there, you don't need to configure anything, right? It's right there. So, there are things that are same in both backdrop and Drupal nine, whatever is right and left and that's not there. I was also very interested in trying to figure out what what we're doing with themes. One good thing about theming is this is your T-shirt, you change it every regularly. So, themes you update regardless of whether you stay on Drupal seven or you go to another. So, you have new themes no matter what. Backdrop has excellent theme that worked for me very well called Bootstrap, surprise, surprise. An I'm very proud of contributing to backdrop, the layout, that's called (UNKNOWN) flexible where right sidebar and left sidebar shows up only and only when it has content unlike some other themes. No, point in thinking.

I just want to be very clear to everyone is like this layout exists and it's available and usable and you install everything from UI, which is a big time saver for people who have one site or two sites or three sites. It is very inconvenient when you have 20 sites and you can run just Drudge Command and upgrade the whole thing, right? When you manage a couple of sites, each of which is very unique, this is much easier to do. And there is drive, by the way, and you need to mention that there is drudge for backdrop as well.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yes. And there's a version of Drudge for backdrop, but we're also building our own tool called BE. Yeah, which is backdrop-specific and does the same kinds of things drudge does.

IRINA:
The theming to answer, there's one big change that takes a little bit of learning and that is called layouts. So, panels are foundation, which I personally am not a big fan of, but that's fine. The layout, our foundation for theming, it works slightly differently than System of Blocks, but System of Blocks was reworked both in Drupal 10 and in backdrop. So, each has a little bit of the learning curve. Both have advantages and disadvantages. I personally find backdrop layout after very little learning very convenient. You click, you edit, you close, it's there, reusable from modules from anywhere. And there was something else that I really wanted to say that worked very well and not to mention security updates and project browser that's in place from the first day. Project browser is in backdrop already, I think since it started.

TIM ERICKSON:
This is the layout. So, first of all, if you just look at the menu in backdrop, it looks very much the same. That is what you would expect in backdrop or Drupal. The biggest change is, everybody that moves to backdrop, the biggest adjustment is the layout system because it basically brought panels into core but with a much nicer layout. We've improved the UI, we've simplified it and made the UI much simpler. You know, I'm not gonna give a lecture on layouts, but I'll at least just put that up on the screen where to go, structure, layouts. So, you know, you have layouts for different types of pages and then you manage blocks on the layouts and every type of page can have a layout. There's visibility rules, it's very nice. It's also the biggest adjustment to get used to, it takes a while. And in terms of themes, themes don't work straight across, you have to redo them. And theming in backdrop, there's much less reliance on like template files because of the layout system in backdrop. So, your theme in backdrop is really like a skin, that's your CSS and then you have layout files, the layouts are treated separately from the theme and then you have your... I don't know what I was gonna say.

But anyway, so a lot of people really struggle with that and they and sometimes they're fighting against backdrop a little bit because they don't understand the changes. And so if you do look at backdrop, spend a little bit of time playing with the layout system right away and make sure you understand it, because otherwise you're gonna be fighting against trying to make things work in the wrong way. That's the biggest change.

IRINA:
That was the first training session that we requested. And after one hour of training, everyone is very comfortable and very flexible. And the huge thing is in seven if you go from theme, so in seven there was panels, context blocks and beams and there was a huge mix. So, everybody was using whatever they wanted, not to mention custom stuff and layout files. Here because we have complete separation, so colors and fonts and, you know, theme truly comes from the theme, blocks are configured in the layout system. And one thing like, well, but where are all my blocks team if you click on reports? This is a slightly different place, but in the reports tab, in reports dropdown, you can click on blocks and here you can see usage of every single block that you have in the system. And because it's in the report section, not in structure section, people coming from Drupal seven don't notice it. So, there's lots of very handy reports also that are extremely helpful in addition to just seal the report.

And for, I think I'm always coming back to this decision tree, am I maintaining a distribution for a whole university or am I maintaining a research project for a particular professor who wants things done his way and doesn't want to have a university wide template on every single page? They want something that is related to their research work. Because I work in research in academia and we have several right now, I didn't work on solo project, so we have four major projects that we did last year with Stanford, and one of them is a research project which is collaboration between Georgia University... Yes. Yeah. George Washington, Stanford and insight? I feel really bad that I forgot the name of the University, and they wanted, so because coming out of Stanford has Stanford feel and book, but the contents are very different and we did full visualization with the D3 JavaScript and very complex structure. So, it is not about whether it's complex or not complex. Soul is very complex with a lot of workflows.

It's just what is what you are doing with the site?

SPEAKER:
If you were customizing the presentation of a view, for instance, does that still live in your theme?

IRINA:
View?

SPEAKER:
Views.

IRINA:
Views live in views. This is a thing that I love about better views live and views. And when you're doing that bridge, you bring your views in because I built mostly with views. The reason why I'm using Drupal altogether is because of views. Because if I don't, if I built anything custom that I don't need Drupal, then I prefer to work with direct coding, right? Why do I need all this? Drupal comes with a lot of overhead, both in HTML, in processing time, lots of limitations. So, the main thing for me to use Drupal is when I'm using content types and views and rules for workflows, right? Because then I can do it like this, but I don't need to code and somebody can come in and work with it because there's lots of developers, right? And we're using all standard tools. So, when I'm doing an upgrade tonight, there is no migration path to use at this point, so I have to rebuild every single view manually. And it's a lot of work and it's a lot of money that potential clients need to pay.

SPEAKER:
Yeah.

TIM ERICKSON:
You were asking about theme though. So...

SPEAKER:
Yeah, if you have to overwrite the look of it of?

TIM ERICKSON:
OK. So, we probably in a template file.

SPEAKER:
Yeah. It's all the same.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah. I mean so you can do that the same, right? I think I've done less of that in backdrop than I did in Drupal because there's so much I can do in the internal layout system, but certainly you can override templates in the same way you do, yeah, it has all the same template kind of suggestions. And we did not go with Twig, we use the same template files. If you want to just on backdropcms.org, there is a demo button and you can spin up a sandbox site to just browse around and they only last 24 hours so you can feel free to do things. You can install modules in these sandbox sites, we have a project browser, we're kind of proud of that, helps install new modules. So, we've been able to do this for years and backdrop where you can browse through all of the available modules and just download and install them directly in the UI and themes, so you can try out the themes that are available or the modules right there in the UI. Oh, and again, I lost a thought. Any other questions? Yeah.

SPEAKER:
Just for backdrop, I'm wondering with all these modules, like how are they being updated?

TIM ERICKSON:
Sure. Actually, and again, that reminded me of one of the thing I was gonna say a minute ago, in terms of modules, one of the criteria that you always need when you're deciding between backdrop and Drupal eight, 10 is what modules are available. If you're upgrading what modules are available? This is more important in the past with backdrop because fewer of the modules have been imported. So first of all, some Drupal modules will just work, Drupal seven modules, you could just plug them into a backdrop site and they'll just work. Now, that's rare, OK? So, I'm not promising that. But the point is, is that the systems, the APIs are similar enough that it can happen. We have a module called Drupal coder Upgrader that allows you to run Drupal seven module through the code or upgrader, in a lot of cases that will produce a working backdrop module in a few minutes. Almost every week goes by or hardly a week goes by where somebody doesn't come into the backdrop community and say, Is this module available?

And it's some small fringe module and somebody in our community says, Let me check, and they run it through backdrop coder and they test it out and it might work. And if so, they say, well, it is now, and if not, then well, you can, you know, you might have to put more work into it. Obviously some modules can, you know, big modules are gonna take a lot of work to port, but it's very common. So, the point is we have over a thousand contrib projects right now for backdrop, including modules and themes. Lots of the major Drupal modules have been ported and they're getting ported more and more all the time. And again, some of them very simple, some of them hard. A big recent one was organic groups. We just recently finished porting organic groups.

SPEAKER:
(CLAPS)I was just wondering about that.

TIM ERICKSON:
Irena was was waiting for that and we were waiting for that. The localization site for backdrop CMS has been on Drupal seven. Well, it still is, but like literally as we're talking, they're finally porting it to backdrop because they've been waiting on organic groups.

SPEAKER:
What about security updates?

TIM ERICKSON:
So, and your question was sort of how they're (CROSSTALK).

SPEAKER:
Excellent question.

TIM ERICKSON:
So, like in Drupal backdrop modules, they have module lib reports that measure degrees to become the maintainer. We do make it very fairly easy and I think Drupal has gotten better at this, it used to be really hard in Drupal, but if like a module has gone dormant, you know, in the background community, if you try to contact a module maintainer and they're just not replying to you, you can within two weeks take over that module, you know, so that it doesn't just go stale. We have a bug squad that we've empowered to, like if there's a security update to a module that doesn't have a maintainer, the bug squad is authorized to go in and update that module, apply a security update or just some other critical bug fix. You know, we don't try as a community to manage all of the modules. We leave that up to individual maintainers, but we do play a little bit more active role in terms of especially if a module has, you know, it's lost its maintainers. We do have a security team, the security team collaborates with the Drupal community security team.

So, we coordinate on all of our security releases 'cause very often security releases that affect Drupal seven also affect Backprop and vice versa. So, we're coordinating and working with Drupal community on that.

IRINA:
Yeah. I would like to add, this is a very important point, and the whole end of life, Drupal seven end of life, it only applies when you talk about security updates. The code is not going anywhere, but what does end of life means is that you don't get any more security updates, that's what it means. And I want to, for the record, to say that backdrop security team and Drupal security team works very closely together. And some contributions to security patches are coming out of people who work with backdrop as a primary tool and we all know that.

TIM ERICKSON:
Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER:
Sorry, just once Drupal seven is end of life and you don't have Drupal security team going and looking for those things and then being able to coordinate, you know, I was wondering use my name.

TIM ERICKSON:
Well, we have our own backdrop team that works with theirs. So, our team will still be in place, people can still report backdrop security concerns to the backdrop team. There won't be as many eyes on it in the sense that...

IRINA:
We don't know. Maybe there are gonna be more eyes. It's not exactly clear.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah.

IRINA:
There is a page that says Drupal security team that lists all the people and their spaces as backdrop security that also lists all the people who you can reach out to in case if you have any questions or concerns about security.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah.

IRINA:
But yes, there it is official security team for the backdrop CMS in the same way like there is a security team for WordPress CMS or Linux or any other open source project.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah.

IRINA:
And there's a way to report for liabilities, responsible disclosure and all these things have been set up.

TIM ERICKSON:
But yeah, there's also some uncertainty in exactly how things work. But we do have, I mean, we have a team we don't feel in any way dependent on the Drupal team, but obviously, you know, once the Drupal seven security team goes away, that will make a difference. Any other questions? We're getting down to our last five minutes and we haven't.

SPEAKER:
I think another comment on that is that the Drupal seven ecosphere is, you know, as big as Drupal nine, right? There's almost 500,000 websites. And so with backdrop, we're at thousands of websites. So, on one side, the exposure to people having their site hacked at and people finding security vulnerabilities and reporting them and getting them fixed is bigger with the Drupal project because there's more eyes on that project. So, that's one concern. One mitigating thing about that is that we've had Drupal seven around for over 10 years and there's been a lot of picking and picking and picking that and so it's in a good state that we've gotten a lot, there's been lots of attempts to try and hack it and there's been lots of rebuffing of that, I'll say, right? So, is your site gonna be vulnerable to an attack? It's always vulnerable. Is it likely that there'll be lots of attacks on it? You know, maybe or maybe not. If you're holding credit cards, I would say don't do that. Don't do that, period.

Don't do that, period. Right. And you have backups, oversight, all those types of things. So...

TIM ERICKSON:
I think we should mention this.

SPEAKER:
I think it's much more a bigger topic for banks than it is for blog sites.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah. Yeah, we got to cover this.

SPEAKER:
It just depends how much exposure you have, how many users you have, how much private data. So, and those will be concerns if you wanna switch to a different site. So...

TIM ERICKSON:
Sorry to sort of interrupt you there. I was under the impression this session went till 10:15, is that correct? Does anybody here for the we're not like expecting another session to be starting in a few minutes.

IRINA:
What time does that session start?

SPEAKER:
10:30.

IRINA:
10:30, OK. Sorry, I was under impression that one is like 10:15, like. Oh, my God, you don't have a break. But yeah, that's great.

TIM ERICKSON:
We want to at least mention this, the guys at Chromatic that started a, how many people know about this podcast? Anybody? No. So, the guys at Chromatic started a podcast about a month ago. They're on their fifth episode, I think focusing on the Drupal seven End of life. And an episode I highly recommend Episode three, where Irina was the...

IRINA:
Four.

TIM ERICKSON:
Four?

IRINA:
Four and five.

TIM ERICKSON:
Well...

IRINA:
Actually...

TIM ERICKSON:
You were on number four.

IRINA:
I'm a number four. Tim Lennon, who is the city of Drupal association five and Mark is next door doing his presentation. But they raised a very good question. They have a different perspective like why is Drupal seven such a big deal? And that's something that people don't quite realize. I believe if you scroll down a little bit here, they say they give an introduction, is on the higher page, explaining why it is such a big deal. And that people don't really explain what it means, end of life, like nobody's taking your code away, but it's like nobody explains what it means, nobody explains how it is impacted. Everybody is panicking, but they're not quite sure about what. So, I highly recommend and they made a big brace because they have very good perspective.

TIM ERICKSON:
Anyway. So, they've really been contributing and pushing this discussion forward and getting some people's attention. And, I mean, it's interesting and that they have sort of acknowledged that despite being very active in the Drupal community and very concerned about this issue, that they really haven't paid that close attention to Backprop until recently. And now they're just sort of discovering us and and Irina really helped fill in the gaps, I think so.

IRINA:
Well, I think that this preview last year was very important because COVID is over and now people are actually looking back. And I worked with Drupal Association as a project manager for GitLab Acceleration Initiative, and people suddenly realize that Drupal seven takes huge amount of time that could be dedicated towards newer system. And it was a great system, but you have to move on. But you can't move on because you have to support community and my perspective was like at Stanford, we had my library It was a great building, nine stories or 12, really big building, holding lots of everything. Everyone loved the building, but it turned out to be seismically unsafe or the earthquakes in it. I can say with earthquakes, even though I can't say what earth correctly because of my pronunciation. So, when the library was built, it was a long time ago, standards were different. Now, it can't withstand earthquake standards. So, the library was taken down completely, but everyone was resettled.

You can't just kick people out or leave people in unsafe building. And this is why people think, what do we do? And then like, oh, there's backdrop, it's a great system, lots of people are using it now and it makes everyone's life easier. So because it's a win win for the entire big Drupal family, because now people who want to move forward with Drupal nine can spend their resources working towards more developer-oriented tools and people who want to have more of the site building can happily move to backdrop and Drupal seven will have a very happy and, you know, happy ending. Let me put it this way.

TIM ERICKSON:
Did we turn off the red button or did it go off?

SPEAKER:
It says green.

TIM ERICKSON:
What?

SPEAKER:
Here it says green.

TIM ERICKSON:
Oh, OK. I can see it. We need to wrap up. let's do a quick, in terms of the soft landing initiative, Maybe you want to make an announcement about tomorrow and or is there anything else that people need to know about that?

IRINA:
There's both today, I think I said it either 2:30, there's both today in the afternoon where I said, I'll be there and we can talk about anything you want related to migration of Drupal seven, whether it's the tools, whether it's a demo, I have a slide show that shows comparison how to move sites from Drupal seven both to Drupal 10 using one click upgrade, which Nate Lampton said, The only reason I came to this presentation, I really wanted to see if there is a one click upgrade and I said yes, if you set things correctly before then you click the one last button and it upgrades. And then the demo of how to do upgrade to backdrop CMS. And I kind of ran them side by side so people can have a little bit better idea of what they're looking at and what tools are available for these migrations. And then tomorrow we're trying to do contribution.

TIM ERICKSON:
During contribution day...

IRINA:
During contribution day it is not limited to code. We would love developers to come and code a couple of modules. We have very specific requests, but if people want just to come and better understand flows or site building, everyone is invited.

TIM ERICKSON:
Yeah. One of the things we're trying to do with the initiative is increase the tools to help people audit their site and figure out what the next step is. So with that, we'll wrap it up. If you do have more backdrop questions to look up Irina or myself or Wilbur and we will talk your ear off. Thank you.