Ambitious projects with constrained budgets - Drupal 7 moving to Backdrop CMS

Hello. Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for taking time to attend my presentation. Um, my name is Irina Zaks. I've been building sites for, uh, higher ed and academia for many years, and I'm also commenting or feeds module for both Drupal seven and Drupal ten. And I have deep interest in data, data migrations and information structure. We also have Stanford Webcam, which is online, and I invite everyone to come back in a month and check out what's new present or hear presentations. Today. Today's presentation is about Drupal seven end of life. Uh, this is a very big event for Drupal community, and it impacts lots of, uh, sites. Uh, I would like this session to be more of a Q&A and discussion rather than demo. So I'm going to do very high level overview. Then I'm going to attempt to do a working live demo. Uh, then we can look at the new layout system, which is one significant advantage that we are getting with the backdrop, which is different both from Drupal ten and Drupal seven, because it combines finally into one universal track.

This problem with configuring blocks, uh, themes and finally separates presentation layer from information architecture layer. And um, then we're going to have questions and answers, and I hope to dedicate the second half at least of the presentation for Q&A. So prepare your questions and I'll start thinking about my answers. Um, so back to Drupal seven. End of life. When do I need to start a migration? And the answer is a long time ago. And, um, the question is why you're not still on on Drupal seven and. Every site is slightly different from the other side, but there's a big combination of two factors that keep people in Drupal seven. Factor number one, my site works great. It does everything that I need. I like, feel and look. Uh, you know, my users are trained to use to update content, whatever they are doing. Uh, my theme, not just front end theme, but also my editorial flows are configured. You're telling me I need to change to get a brand new car? Because there's a law that requires now smog check how much money I'm going to spend.

And here's the second factor that impacts migrations. I don't have budget to upgrade to Drupal ten, which is supposed to be most logical path. So there's like, um, what do I do now? I begin planning my update. If I want to be successful. I need to think about what? What do I do? What do I need to do during the update process? And I group it on themes, I need to have some rough estimate on where do I spend my time. And when we're saying Drupal migration, some people are like, oh, okay, I need to move data. That's the migration. I need to move pictures. That's a migration. No, that's not the migration. Everything together. A migration includes many more things which are listed and very often come as a surprise to site owner like, oh, I need to retrain my team. We have different user interface now, or oh, I need to clean up my current site because I can't bring everything to my site like people don't think about it. Uh, this is rough distribution this picture has been in. I don't know how many presentations we also prepared.

Migration checklist, uh, that is available to anyone who wants to use it, that outlines, uh, steps that are happening during the whole migration project rather than the purely moving data from one place to another. This file is available to everyone on the web. Uh, and you can, um, get the link. So link to the slides is in the mid camp, um, session. So everything is connected. That's why we call it web because it's all connected. Um, and as I mentioned this is the very high level overview for now because I want to spend most of the time talking about the details. Um, first step is understand your needs. What are you doing? This presentation is not designed for people who answer no to the first question. If you say, does my Drupal seven site work for me? And the answer is no, this presentation, um, is not as relevant as it could be, because then you're looking at redesign, you're looking at rebuilding site, you're looking to figure out completely different things that if you are like, okay, I like it.

I want it like this. I just need to have someone check. Um, the next check that we usually do is my site has complex structure, simple sites can be very easily moved to WordPress, and that's a good path. And from the very beginning, if you have just a simple blog or a simple magazine site on half of the time since 2010, I would say no. I suggest you go with WordPress because it designed for that kind of, uh, you know, for that kind of site. But when you work with a site that has complex relationship and in higher ed, it's a very typical site. You have department, Department has courses, instructors schedule these things needs to pop out automatically. You have, you know, times you have sessions that you don't want to copy paste all of that. And WordPress does not have out of the box well-developed system of views and content types. They they exist there, but they're like kind of a second thought. Um, since Drupal six CC and views were, to me, most important tools that we're uh, and the reason why I was using Drupal, it's like almost we can call it I because you tell your site I want to see all the classes that are taught by that professor, and the system knows how to do it, what, 15 years ago?

Um, so once you go through this checks, you have workflows, notifications, you have large, um, code base of custom modules. Because like in our sites, I have a bunch of processes there are coded like okay, if this then that send people here present things in a certain way, generate this kind of reports. If you say, okay, I do have all these things, then we my recommendation is run site audit module. And then this is a very good time. When you say okay Drupal ten is a good best option for me, whether it's 10 or 11 or whatever comes next. But sometimes you look at it and you can read long article that says migrations of Drupal seven cost considerations. And this is where you begin talking about, um, budgets as well. Um, site audit module. We released it. It was developed by pantheon very long time ago. It was built in part of pantheon workflow. Um. A Portland. We had a cold sprint and we released it as a module for Drupal seven that has UI, and it what it does in some extent, it does what Drupal does to data.

It combines all the reports that Drupal has already into more readable, more more efficient report. And you can see it here. You can this is example of reasonably clean site. So in settings here you can select what exactly you want to see you. And all this information is kind of available somewhere like you can guess list of views in your uh list of views you can get um code base. You know, what modules are there? You can get list of users. You can get list of blogs. But if you want to get it all together for your site audit so you can give it in this format, uh, directly to your customer or directly to your content editor so they can evaluate it. And here some useful things that are in there in addition to overview, like, oh, here's like all my content types. Yes, you can get this by clicking admin views. But here you can see okay, I only have one hero image. Do I really need to migrate this content type? Am I really using it? Site audit is also very helpful tool to to run your site's maintenance, and it's available for Drupal ten as well if somebody cares.

Um, very useful thing duplicate titles. Sometimes they are duplicate for a good reason, and sometimes just somebody entered three times the same bio and you need its help. Very helpful to clean it up. And then fields are available in your fields list. But this report shows you how many count of each field you have. And that is very helpful when you are planning migration because I'm just like, oh, um, let me see. I only have one of those. Am I using it? And why do I have, um, I don't see where the largest number. So for the paragraph of words, I have that many paragraph of words like okay. And by the way, this module is, as you can imagine, open source. If somebody wants to improve it and say, oh, I really want to be able to click on count and see them in the order, please submit a patch. We'll talk to maintainer and he will commit it. And yeah, we data tables uh JavaScript is not included there. There are easy solution, but if somebody is using it it feels like oh this is very helpful but could be better.

Here's a power of open source. Um, the next thing that we do when we begin planning migration is we check, um, what modules have been migrated or have been ported to whatever system we want to port. If we're reporting Drupal ten, there is upgrade status that works very well, and it works both for ten. I think it's already available for 11, I'm not sure. Uh, and then this module is called Backdrop Upgrade status. You run them in parallel and you can see how many modules you have in one system and how many modules you have in another system, because from 9 to 10 it's reasonably easy to port modules, but from 7 to 10 on the regular basis, like, oh, how do I do that? And we're not even talking custom, custom code on our projects. We see benefit of using site audit module about 15% because before we're like get that report, get this report, you have to involve either site builder or developer into something that now can be downloaded in one click. And then you give it to people who are working with a customer to review things.

All right. So this is done. Step two. Now we know where we're migrating. As I mentioned this is a backdoor presentation. If you do have questions about migrations to Drupal 910 we can also talk about them. But that has been described in detail in many other presentations. And some of them are mine. Now we're doing a list of tasks for migration. So what do I need to do new? I need to set up where I'm going to be developing and hosting modules, configuring base entities, migrate data. Um, theme. Let's figure out what we're doing with theme. Do we need completely new theme? Do we need, um, you know, three front end developers to work on it? Or we can take existing whatever bootstrap based or tailwind based theme that is already in place and do just modifications and figure out, you know, what's the best, then I need to make sure that I do specific my configuration with all the, um, blocks views, stuff like this test, debug test, debug test, test. No more debugging. Great launch. Um, this is general slide that talks about philosophy of best practices, how to build things on schedule and on budget.

Right tool for the job, um, which is basically reiteration of how you do any, uh, any process. So it is as so you have as little stress as possible and as much of positive income outcome as possible. So here I'm going to dive into the actual test and I'm going to hop off. This presentation is about this new module which is we released in December of 2023. It was an amazing project. Um, from from the perspective of how open source actually works. Uh, this year, bootcamp didn't have a like full blown bootcamp in November. And we said, okay, all right, we'll do just a, uh, sprint. And this is extremely useful tool. Can we make it actually work? Because there was a placeholder that somebody that a developer great developer put in long time ago, he's very much in UI part. Um, it's like, oh, this is what we need and we make it work and we start in November 18th and before Christmas, the model was released and there wasn't that many, um, there was a couple of zoom meetings where people got together and talk like, what is a good process?

What is a bad process? What's helpful? What is not model is still in beta, and it's doing, uh, exactly what Michael has mentioned. Um, I think year and a half ago he said, well, if you want, if you have a site that can simply migrate to backdrop, what I want to see is I plug in, um, you know, database credentials or backup, click the button, it moves modules, it moves database. And then you can configure the rest. Um, Michael has his next door doing amazing presentation with his students, but, um, his vision is now implemented. The the module is built on top of backup and migrate, and this module has been since Drupal 5 or 6. Uh, lots of people use it. It has the same architecture. So it's UI who guides you through all these steps. And we have and our experience is that it saves you about 30% of the part that lies between data import and logic and rules, because it migrates all the views, it migrates, um. Let me see if it were her. I have a list somewhere. Uh, out of the box migrates all users with their passwords because it's not a migration, it's an upgrade.

You take the database, and your existing database is now converted into, uh, soft secure. The key. The key thing is that we need to have software that has certificate. It's of, uh, support. Right. Security releases is what driving Drupal seven end of life community cannot support. Um. Sorry. Uh. You need to have this security certificate. There's not enough bandwidth in Drupal community to support both Drupal and security release and Drupal seven security releases. Drupal seven is was great system, but you can't get it when you put it out out of the box. It has requires a lot of work and it doesn't have lots of great features. So we need something else that will be sustainable for site builders. So backdrop. Is Drupal seven that was grew out for site builders. It was a very interesting conversation with, I think it was conversation with chromatic folks a year ago and they're like, well, developers like Drupal seven, but it wasn't sufficient enough. So they built Drupal eight. And site builders, you know, should be free to build what they want.

And they built and it's called Backdrop CMS. It combines all the great things. It has configuration management, uh, which makes DevOps cycle much easier. It has CDK editor and core. It has, um, clearly views and, you know, all a bunch of advanced things and it has admin toolbar and core. I still have to install admin toolbar every single time I install Drupal ten. I still have to install admin toolbar, and I can't do anything without it. With backdrop, I get it out of the box, I get um, tokens out of the box and a bunch of things that for me, as when I'm doing site building, they are critical. Um, so it's kind of what Drupal what logical extension of Drupal seven. So when we're doing this migration, we're taking Drupal seven data base the way it is. We upgrade it. So now it runs in, um, Backdrop CMS. And so content is preserved, structure is preserved, user preserved blocks. Most of them are preserved until unless they're built with super custom designs. Because you can build blocks in so many ways, it's like, uh, path aliases are preserved, which is great because I don't need to deal with redirects.

And this is why, if we're going to go back to this diagram, this is why this number is so large. And for people who need to migrate and have limited budget, this is a very significant, um, part of how can we get off Drupal seven? So. Let's try to follow the steps that we outlined. So we'll say okay let's select hosting. Um, you can host uh, but I'm going to do demo on local a pantheon provides out of the box hosting with all the standard pantheon DevOps. Uh, in higher ed, we need to be hosting on an approved vendor so we can just host wherever we want. So having a backdrop on pantheon for us is, uh, very important. Um, you can set up new site in various ways. There's, uh, for those who want to install it using Lambda, there is a Lambda um, plugin. And I was very excited, um, to see that developers are working on making sure that all the tools for backdrop are there. Um, I usually would just simply download backdrop using download button from Backdrop CMS front page. Um, recently we've seen that you can also easily install it using cPanel tools.

Softaculous already has it. Installatron is installing it in April. Uh, there's lots of ways to do it depending on what, uh, what your where your customer wants to see their final site. Uh, next step we're going to supposed to install contrib modules. I'm going to use db db module for that. And then uh themes. And then we're not going to clearly address custom modules right now. But um, we're going to touch the top of the iceberg on how it's done. Um, you can install project browser, project installer, whatever you call it is been has been in, uh, backdrop since day one. And we're very excited that it's going to be on Drupal 11 hopefully as well. I participated in Project Browser, I think two years ago. Uh, it's good to see it all coming together. And you can use Drush. There is also new tool called be. Uh, some people are building Composer based installations, so it's not like you're limited to something. It's, uh, open source. We put together the demo. Uh, you can click on this link and, um, watch YouTube recording, uh, which shows first how you install modules and how you can run, upgrade and configure the tools.

And today we're going to attempt to do the live demo again. We have drums. Um here we go. So I think that the one of the interesting things about live demo is that you can always find something new and exciting that, uh, work perfectly well last time, um, one thing that I, I don't think I included in the slide for the presentation, but I will after that. Uh, on Wednesdays at 11 Pacific noon midterm, there is a user group meeting is an office hour. Sorry. Their office hours. Um, we have here at least two people who participate in office hours and the regular basis. Let's give them a round of applause. And if you want to try to be model yourself, but you're like, ah, I'm not sure. Please come to office hours and you will be guided through this interesting process and exciting process, and we will have a chance to see what's broken on your personal side. Then we will going to put it into an issue, and then somebody will come in and fix it, because tomorrow we have a plan to go and fix all the things that we've recorded last week.

Okay. So this is my this is the testing small site, uh, just to make sure that we don't run this for a long time. Um, yes. Can I.

>>:
Just clarify? I'm not sure if everybody quite got that. The backdrop community has open office hours every Wednesday, 2 p.m. central. It's it's changed. We use a UTC time. So it did shift for those of us in the US recently. But anyways, it's open office hours. There's Justin and myself. Other people are usually there and you can just drop in and we've answered questions. And over the last couple of weeks, we've helped one site owner walk all the way through this upgrade process. So it's a free opportunity to get folks live, you know, immediate answers to your question, okay. For recording because I'm not sure if I had been hurt. Uh, office hours Wednesday, 2 p.m. Central time, central time. And on the website backdrop. cms.org. You can find the link to office hours and make sure. And usually it will display office hours in your own time. Yeah okay so this is a little bit preset. Um, this is so this is my source site. And we're going to try to run migrations for this source site. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to enter this is screen is very similar to Drupal ten one click upgrade which I was so excited about in 2016.

Um, you enter your database credentials and then you click connect. If your site is not connected and I might have one that is not connected yet. Uh, this you will see the message that says, um, your site is not connected.

>>:
Um, so you're at an empty backdrop site right now? Basically, yes. This is this is out of the box. You installed a backdrop site. This is what it looks like when you install it first time. The only thing I did to, uh, minimize number of problems that I'm going to see today was I went here to install new modules. Um, this are the modules list. If I want to find a module like these, I don't know. I already have feeds installed, most likely, but it will tell me very clearly. This is already downloaded. Uh, you can I can add these things to installation queue if I want, or, um, I can uninstall modules here. Um, and then here, once they're installed, I can enable them or keep them disabled. So yes.

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Before you get to that though, when you install the blank backdrop site, you have to go to the list of articles and turn on project installers so you can install. Because it doesn't come out of the box turned on. Okay. Um, for the purposes, for the purposes of recording, I want to emphasize that backdrop out of the box comes with the screen that allows you to install new modules. The important thing we will see after we run the migration, this uh, screen is usually disabled because in Drupal seven you don't have a project installer. So after you run an update, you definitely need to go and re re enable this module. And this is a great exercise that we will try to do in the live demo. Thank you. That was a very great, very good comment. I knew it was somewhere. Yes I had to turn it off. So our next step will be. If we follow the script. And there's this interesting idea, which I try to I'm trying to bring this idea everywhere. Create your checklist and then go through your checklist. Don't try to reinvent your reinvent the process.

Every time you run a migration. Go through the checklist. Step one uh install backdrop. Step two get module D to be because I'm I'm doing the demo today. I'm not installing it, but I'm like okay, it's already enabled. Great. Step three go to either system backdrop and migrate and click at the start. If you're doing it first time it will say, uh, connect to your database. If you're doing it a second time, we have this information, um, saying this is where you're connected, this is what you're getting because you have an option to, to to pull in things and completely replace your database. And you want to know where you're getting it from. Because when we didn't have this, it was like, oh, I think I pulled dev site. Oh no, I got it from live site. What's going on? Something is not working. So, um, have a record of what you're doing. You can also upload a backup file if you want to. But for the purposes of today, we already set up our source database. Uh, the next step is we'll go and do database analysis.

This is the part that goes and checks which modules you have or you haven't when you're doing it first time you don't have any listing. It's blank. There's just two buttons because this is a demo version. I would run this analysis, but if I need to add more modules or something has not been imported or something is missing, it will show up in the list. And sometimes I run it 2 or 3 times to make sure that I got everything and I got everything right. If you have, uh, 279 modules and you're trying to download them all because that's your next step, I'm like, okay, here, I had 100 projects. These are already downloaded. Great. I can see that this one was disabled at source. Okay, I guess I don't need it. Um, if I ever need it, I can install it, uh, directly from the UI. Uh, from this screen, I can always install it, um, if it's already downloaded. Even if it was disabled at source, you don't need it. Uh, lots of important modules that Drupal seven didn't have in core are in core now, like date, email link redirect.

Uh, and then here's a bunch of things that, uh, are available for download, but I didn't I disabled them in my source, so I don't probably don't need it. Um, this is a core backdrop upgrade status. This tells you that the module exists in GitHub backdrop contrib repository, but it doesn't have a release. So the difference between this module like web form and module, um, backdrop upgrade status means the release was not created. So you will have to download it directly to your file system and install it like in the old days when you were installing modules. Uh, not through your eye then. Lots of like diff is in core. Lots of things that I had to download, like diff is still not in Drupal ten core. Um, and then here's the list of things that used to be there. Uh, and they're not yet ported. Maybe I don't need that. So the next thing what I do is, okay, let me download all the projects that are not downloaded. And then I'm like, actually, I don't need, uh, I don't need, I don't need Captcha.

Of course I don't need this this, this I'm going to leave Entity Connect just in case cuz we're not doing I don't have any of this. So I have this option now to either select all or deselect all or I say okay I need flag module, just one module. Download available projects. You can download either everything or just one thing and um, sometimes it will enable it, sometimes it won't. But it doesn't really matter at this time when we're doing migration, because when we're bringing Drupal seven database in, we don't it will tell what's. Need to be enabled or disabled. We're bringing in a system table and says this model needs to be enabled or disabled. Uh, it's much easier to deal with file directly and just drop the zip archive into the files directory. This is the most important step. This is Cirque du Soleil. So what happens now? When I click this button, I click upgrade Drupal seven database. So effectively this is usually where things will break. It can give a couple of different messages.

We'll see which one it will give it this time. So what it does it tells backup and migrate go into. And I'm going to open and show what happens behind the scenes. Um it says backup and migrate restore from uh restored from this uh. Database, which we downloaded when we said when we connect it to the host. Through the window, it downloaded the entire database stored in the backup directory. And now we're trying to bring it in. And if things work correctly, let's see whether they will or not. It took database and now the site does not have original backdrop database. Now you have the Drupal seven database. It's already in place. This is what's in there. And then the next thing I need to do is I need to click here and click continue. And this is the process of upgrading to backdrop. And once this process has been completed, uh, I can step down. And ta da da da. You have the new site. The size of the site only matters when you have either lots and lots of modules, or when you have huge databases because it just servers break, they break.

They just don't process. But basically we're done. Thank you very much. We can all go home.

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Right? Um. Uh, here we go. Does this look exactly the way it should? I am not so sure. Let me see. First of all, where is my I can't I can't add themes, I can't modules, I don't know what to do. This is where I reference this wonderful note. Thank you very much. And I go and say project installer. Uh, this this module uh, is a bread and butter for site builders. Because if you don't have it right here, then you still have to download uh, put move. You have to have a SftP. This is just like boom, it's right there. So now I can also see what's going on with themes. What I see here with themes is I have this. So at Stanford we develop two years ago um backdrop theme based on Stanford theme decanter. I have feel and look. And then the next thing let me double check my list I'm supposed to do. Okay, this is already migrated. All these things that we normally do, all the testing run, all the configurations. Oh, we forgot that field or this has to be changed. It's done. I don't need to think about it now.

I'm here. Set step four. Uh, set your theme and place blocks. This is very, very interesting, uh, thing that has been introduced in backdrop, and I, it took a little bit of time to, for me to learn it well, but it is very powerful what it does. It shows you all your blocks. So the layout system is a best of both worlds. It has, uh, theme separated from layout. And that was always a little bit challenging in Drupal seven, especially when you say, okay, I want to switch theme and all your blocks fall apart. There was a number of modules that were dealing with it. We had panels, we had contacts and all this, but we had again, we had lots of different things and different people will install things differently and will configure it differently. Layout system, which is sitting under a structure and comes with several layouts, uh, is the core of how uh, front end like blocks layouts are configured. Um. These are called layout templates. And you can see familiar pictures of what the template looks like and in your layouts.

Uh, let me see here in the layouts you can see out of the box, you get separate layout for the home page, uh, separately out for admin dashboard with slightly differently different layout. It also, uh. Different. Um, and you can do layout overrides and you also can do, um, your own layouts. Uh, there was a wonderful presentation, I believe, yesterday. So we can all now watch the video because today is just an introduction and high level layouts are new. They require a little bit of learning, um, when you're trying to customize things. But this learning pays back big time because now I can say, okay, let me see. So these are all my blocks that I have in the system. I remember we used to have block blocks under structure. That was my like, oh, where how do I see a list of blocks? One of the interesting challenges with list of blocks, because we're tied to theme is like I was switching blocks, theme regions, all these things were kind of linked together. Here I have separately list of blocks where know what is where and I know where it's coming from.

And then in layouts. And by the way, I can access layouts from every page and on every page I can see whether I'm using default layout or I am using different layout. So this is I'm using different layout and things are configured out of the box. So as a site builder I have one less click, two less clicks. Uh, and I can see that on my layout that is dealing with research agendas. I have this blocks. Let's say I want to add something probably not on the live site. Um, so here let's look at this default layout. One thing I can do in the header block I can change user menu to main menu. And if my theme is built correctly um it should. Work. So now I have my theme where I want it. I don't want this thing. I can say, okay, configure a block which will take me exactly where I want it. And okay, I see this is configure block main menu. I can either remove it completely if I'm very confident or just disable. And this disabling saved me lots of time. Every time when I said oh I don't need it, oh, oops, it's the wrong thing, I, I wasn't paying attention.

Um. I definitely don't need this block. It was previous theme and on I'm going to say remove. Uh, I want to move demo block here for a change. And also, um, now I have this white space. Like, why do I have this white space? This is like big philosophical discussion between people who feel differently about how layout should be done. I. Think the great things about open source, that you can have enough flexibility so you can do things your way without interfering with other people's way. The one thing here is okay, I can configure layout default layout. We developed something that is called I don't see what I need. Hey, I remember last time you told me that I need to click somewhere. Where do I click? Where do I click? Oh okay, I see I need to go to layouts. Yes. And then here in layouts I can install new layout templates. And this is one important thing that where we want to have a very clear understanding, like there's a layout template and actual layout, and the relationship is similar to okay this is content type.

This is the node. Uh, because terminology is not like you can never have absolutely clear terminology. It's something that people need to at some point okay. This is template. This is actual layout. Um I want this is flexible. I was very happy that we were able to contribute to open source. Here we go. I want um, this are my outstanding modules. Do I need them? No, not right now. I'm going to go here and I'm going to change admin. Not not this page default layout. I'm going to change layout to this one, because I believe that if my left sidebar is empty, I don't want the white space. I want it like this. Um, and I think it would be good at this point for me to complete the demo. I think I covered most of the things that I wanted to show. Um, I want to mention, uh, great development tools. Uh, it's called Coder upgrade. This is a very important tool for developers who are attempting to upgrade custom modules. Uh, if you have a custom module and you need to upgrade it to backdrop, try this tool.

It will. It's basically I it will replace all the, you know, special where it was Drupal something to backdrop something. And then if you still something is not running on your page from your PHP 7.1 module on 8.1, uh, maybe it's time to really upgrade because all the underlying things are also upgrading. We don't have k three anymore. We don't have PHP seven anymore. So this is time to to look into what's the what's your technical debt, where you are ready to move on and where you still need to work with older structures? Uh, a couple of notes about known issues with D to be, uh, they're being addressed one at a time, and eventually they will be fixed. If you want to contribute just as the user and say, this is how I would like this to work, this is the problem that we all are seeing, but we don't have a good solution for that. You don't have to be a coder. You can say this works for me. Can you guys code it? That's how I usually do. Uh, a little bit about those who didn't work with configuration management.

It's important learning curve. Uh, one additional thing for backdrop comparing to Drupal seven is um, we now do backup of files, configuration, database code and configuration. So if you're moving things between two instances, you need to pay attention to to to all the configuration. Um, and now here we are. I need to say a couple of things quick. First of all, if it's not clear to anybody, the general process that Irina described has worked for a long time. But what we didn't have was this E to B module, which just made it easier. And Irina has been really working hard over the last year and year to get that module, just making this process easier. So the process was fundamentally the same, but you had to do a few more things manually that now you can do automatically. The I also just your last point about code or upgrader, you know, Irina showed that there were a bunch of modules that hadn't been ported from Drupal yet. One of the things the big benefits of backdrop over modern Drupal is that porting modules is much simpler, right?

When basically going from Drupal seven to modern Drupal, whether you're using contrib modules or custom modules, you have to completely rewrite them. For modern Drupal with backdrop, they're sometimes just some functions that have to be changed. They're sometimes very minimal work. So you might find a contrib module that you're dependent on for Drupal seven. And it might be important in 20 minutes, especially with this code or upgrader. It will like go through and look for the obvious function changes automatically make them and modules are getting ported from Drupal seven to background every week. We have over 1000 projects, most of which were Drupal seven projects and have worked in the background. And little modules get ported, you know, quickly and easily on an ongoing basis if people need them. There are bigger modules like, say, the Commerce module, which is not an easy one. Uh, the Commerce module hasn't been ported. I'm at my team's in the process of porting the domain access module, which is another big one.

You know, some big ones like Ubercart and others have been around already reported a long time. But anyways. Yeah. Um, all right, we're going to go with this. It sounds like this is, uh, when you do the when you do the database poll, it's a one shot. It's not like the kind of thing where you can run updates after it, you know? So sometimes with the migration, it lasts several weeks. And with like if you're doing a Drupal migrate thing, you can do updates where basically if the database is changed, it'll just pull in the difference, which you have to rerun the whole thing with this. Uh, how would that work? Yes, you can run the whole thing, but it is a very simple run. And you can you actually run the screen at any time? Uh, if you. So here's what happens if you have, uh, okay. This is already migrated. Uh, that's a good question. I will try to write it up a little bit in more detail, but every time you pull the database, it's because the process is so simple. Uh, you just run the update.

I guess it'll dump what you had before and then redo it. Basically, if I come back in a week after I, oh, there were some issues with this and that and I got to straighten this out and now I'm ready to do it again. It's going to empty the database and then basically bring it in fresh so there's not duplicated. Yes, yes. If you've imported the database and started configuring your site, save your configuration. Yes. Export the configuration. Because then when you're import the database, you just import the configuration that you altered. And then you've got new content and your gotcha. All like all your blocks are saved. I'd like to say I don't know if Irina disagrees with me on this, but the word migrate, I plan to be very confusing because this is actually the need to be upgrade process. It's just upgrading the database. So it's not like using the migrate module, where you can sort of get a rate that you're describing. This is a one time thing that happens to the database, and which is a little bit technically is different than a migration.

And so you do you do have to just rerun the whole process, but you can't iterate and like do it once, find the problems and then sort of the next time you do it, you can care for those problems. Well, it. Is a migration in the sense that you're not being able to upgrade the Drupal seven site directly. You've got a separate code base with backdrop, and you're pulling the database in this.

>>:
This is, but. You're upgrading the database. For me, a migration is we're not taking the database to the new site. We're taking the data. We're pulling it out of the old database and bringing it into the new site. I consider that a migration. We're actually taking the old database, and we're changing the database to make it newer, and that I consider to be an upgrade. It's still a very, very good question because it applies to your workflow like you. Both things in. Something is not working. Uh, you don't have a theme or something you need. And I think the biggest work will be in the layouts and configuration in the layout. Or if you have, like, rules or users or roles or something like this. So what happens is you should save your new configuration in code. I need to pull out Jen's article. Uh, that explains step by step how to save configuration and code. It's exactly. It's very similar to how you do configuration management in Drupal ten. Exactly the same thing in WordPress. I hate it when I have to go over there.

I'm like, ah. Yes. Yes. No security. Here? Yes. Someone changes something I don't even know. Yes. And this is why backdrop is, for me, such a great system. Because it addressed all the pain points that I had with Drupal seven. Uh, one of which was configuration management. Because there was no. You had to if features didn't work very well. So configuration management was is much better thought through uh, configuration uh features. Right now the challenge with that is for site builders. It's a little bit like, oh how do I need to get code here. I need to save it here. I take it from active to staging so you can um. So if on the new backdrop site you put, you change configuration, you move your stuff from staging to active or active to staging. I don't remember exactly because I usually don't do that. We have here people who will be happy to tweak with your configuration on the fly on the live site. Um, but you can the the answer to your question, that team was saying, yes, you can save your configuration.

And when you bring in your database, next time your configuration that you fixed will be already in place. So if you made some fixes on your source database, it will brought up cleaner. But if you made some config changes they will. You can preserve them programmatically and commit them in Git or whatever system you're using and have the commit says this are changes that are committed here so you know exactly what you've done. And this is the module that we found recently. Um, and I want to thank, uh, Ronan for finding this module that allows you to save your configuration in Drupal ten, which for me is a site builder, is amazing. And now my hope would be that backdrop community will port it to backdrop and that will be the final, you know, cherry on top, because then we need developers to actually code new features and actually code new modules. And we don't need developers to change labels because the because customer and content people say, oh, you know, we want to give it a different name.

We don't want, you know, to call it whatever. We want to change the name of taxonomy. And then you have developer to do all this stuff, which makes projects very expensive. And if it can be done at the content editor, oops, sorry. At the content editor level, that will be much better.

>>:
So. Purpose of Bayesian operating. Who's the next Drush? Drupal is a Swedish business. Security. Uh, new features and. Special features. Write us Drupal community is about 1 million something. Contributors. Backdrop CMS record is about 100. What? No no no no no no. Look. Hold on. This is this is very interesting. I'm going to find this article from Drupal watchdog from 20 Drupal watchdog. I was just showing this recently in an interview. So this is reasonably old article, but it's a very interesting article that people rarely quote because we're saying, oh, there is. How many did you say Drupal contributors? Uh, more. Than 1 million. I seriously doubt that there's a million of Drupal contributors. I think that there is over a million of Drupal users, and I've been in Drupal community for a reasonably long time, and people who actually contribute, uh, I think that they belong into this, uh, 2%. Right. So there were over a million Drupal. Sites, it says like. At least I can read the particular on the page, but it's a part Google part to get that information from About us on Google.

More than 1 million passionate developers, designers, trainers, strategies, coordinators, editors and sponsors work together. I that that I totally agree. And this this is very consistent with with the picture because we're saying there's lots of strategies, there's lots of users, there's lots of people who use Drupal. And this is a great system. Uh, one thing that I want to reiterate, you had three very good questions. One was security. Second was new features. And third was, um, PHP, uh, support. All these three things are addressed similarly in Drupal 910, 11. And I work with both Drupal uh, with Composer and I work also with Backdrop CMS. Backdrop CMS is. Cousin of Drupal nine, 1011. They both have one single kind of sauce. They were forked from Drupal seven. They are addressed for slightly different audiences. At the end of the day, the audience is merged together and come back to those strategies, users, um, and people who are contributors in the way that they use this software.

Right. Um, and these two systems are very close. The Backdrop CMS serves. People who don't have sufficient budget to use Drupal ten. One of the big limitations of Drupal 910 it's it's expensive and. More or less. I'd say that Backdrop CMS provides affordable housing to those who can't move to Drupal nine and. So in other. Words, it's a solution which can prolong your site living for maybe the next five or for some reason ten years. But in terms of community at least what I see um, statistic on. Wicked and. Bloody good. Yesterday was a number of communities, a number of people who attend to Backdrop CMS community like, uh, nowadays. It was a lesson for. Was lost for years. Because of that. You know at least what I see. How many years? Four years. Four years. Till 2024. Yeah. And, uh, if this, um. Sedation will continue. It's very likely that we Backdrop CMS will lose the community entirely. So at the end of the day, if this process will continue, the owners of. What's the size if. We use Backdrop CMS to basically adjust the same issues?

The website will stop getting surveys. So in other words, it's it's like at least what how I can see it right now. It's a solution. Nice solution. Which can prolong like life of all the Drupal side. But it's. Dampers. If I understand it correctly. It's a very good question whether yeah, we all are I. Yeah, yeah. And even our planet is just. So for. For recording I just so people can it's a very good question. The question is like um. Both Drupal 910 and backdrop address three main points security, um PHP upgrades and um, new features. Um, the question is what is the life cycle of Backdrop CMS compared to life cycle of Drupal? So it's very it's not really apples and oranges because when I need to migrate. Uh Drupal. Nine to Drupal ten, I'm again. I'm migrating. Um, migrating. I'm getting a little smoother, but not that much smoother. Um, for how long? You can have the site on Backdrop CMS. Uh, is it five years? Is it ten years? It's not exactly clear to predict. Both Backdrop and Drupal were released.

Uh Drupal. Eight were released approximately at the same time. And as of now, we have one third of all Drupal sites and Drupal seven. And it's ten years after Drupal nine was released. So there is clearly something that blocks these people from moving, and usually it's the price tag. Um, how often do we redesign the site? Approximately every 3 to 5 years. If I have a site for 3 to 5 years, usually in five years, we're like, oh, there's new theme. There's, you know, we're moving off bootstrap. We want, um, tailwind. There's always technology changes. So at this moment, if I can give my sites another five years for 25% of the cost, it's a very big factor, even for people who do have money. There is a very good article about it on Atn's site about, um, migration of Stanford. So I can put in here, um, FOSS one Stanford. Stanford saved, uh, half a million. This article, this one. So this is very the article that talks in detail. Why, um, why, uh, Stanford that does have budget has chosen to migrate to backdrop instead of migrating to Drupal ten.

And I really like this quote. So that is, um, something that also drives, um, how you allocate money in higher ed and nonprofit. So. Well, of course doesn't get. Joking. How many installs are there? Do we know. Where for. Backdrop? Yeah, there's count on. I think it's, uh. It's the number is not that large. It's, uh, under ten K, but it's growing. I know that I have, like, lots of sites that were waiting until. Okay, that's the end of the story. We're not going to have security certificate on January 5th, 2025. They're like, okay, can you migrate? Can you migrate, can you migrate? So I have like right now I have five sites that are waiting for URL to switch from Drupal seven site to backdrop. Okay. And I have another ten sites that are waiting for me to find time so I can move them. So it's a. Yes. So I was considering backdrop for a project and you mentioned commerce is not migrated, but I wanted to ask about the big modules. Um, maybe two questions.

>>:
One if something like Ubercart is already migrated from seven to backdrop, but you see that the seven version has updates since then, and the ubercart in backdrop has not been updated for a long time. What's what's you know, is there a standard approach to upgrade it again and overwrite it? Is there a chance they fork it over and backdrop? I guess there's a chance. I mean. It's an interesting situation because it's had a lot of work separately in backdrop from the Drupal seven version. Okay. But I believe. There is an upgrade process and that, you know, it should work for for them. I can't promise you that in the individual case, but there are upgrade paths with a lot of modules, and one like Ubercart would kind of require an upgrade path. I mean, because it's not that useful if you have to manually move your data. So I you know, I think that should work. The other thing is it's under active development. So if you're trying to do an upgrade with running into a problem, we have developers that will probably help you fix that very quickly.

I mean, it, it's a it's a very actively maintained that. All of the add on modules that come with it, like those get ported seemingly all the time and new ones appear. Um, yeah. What about a Drupal. Seven site that uses commerce use? Yeah. I mean, there actually there is a re-emergence of a pretty major site right now that uses Commerce and Drupal seven that is talking about investing in a port of the entire commerce. Well, I won't say the entire ecosystem because so many of the main of the heart of it. I can't guarantee anything there. But it looks, you know, we haven't had anybody who that was willing to invest because that's a big port. That's a big step. Um, but we have had people that have just that are really happy with the card. Now it's not you can't do a direct upgrade. That's the downside. So the, the. The loader clock is ticking. The more people are like okay, we actually have to do it. And this is where you start counting money. And it was actually a very good question. Like what do I buy.

Uh, like it's over a lifetime. Well how much money do I save and how much money do I spend? What do I do in five years? Well, if in five years Drupal whatever is version at that time, uh, wants to reemerge back and bring back all the features that we have now in backdrop, and it works for me as a site builder. Migration from backdrop back to Drupal is as easy as from Drupal seven to Drupal 910. It's exactly the same thing, and that's something that I probably should again, add to slides. And it's the big message that has been discussed many times with Drupal Association and like, what's the what's the merge process? As soon as things are in place, as soon as people can begin using Drupal, uh, with Composer, uh, for the site builder, then no problem. Great. Move on. Keep the community merge. But right now there's a huge discrepancy between what site builders can do and where you need developer. But to answer the question, yes you can. You can migrate here, you can buy yourself five years and then you can move back or move forward or move around, whatever it is.

Thank you very much.