Upgrading a website from Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS

I’ve created a short tutorial on upgrading a website from Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS as part of my work with Freeform Solutions. I encourage you to reach out if you have any questions.

Perhaps you got here because your Drupal 7 website is getting crusty and you are searching for alternatives. I’m going to show how to upgrade a website from Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS.

Why should you trust us? I’m Herb van den Dool, a senior developer and project manager at Freeform Solutions. I’ve already got a few Drupal 7 (and Drupal 6) upgrades to Backdrop CMS knotched up. Some of those have been complicated websites integrated with [CiviCRM}(https://civicrm.org/) and custom modules. At Freeform Solutions we many years of collective experience keeping valuable non-profit websites secure and well-maintained. We take you and your website needs seriously. Feel free to get a hold of us if you want our help.

You may have heard about Backdrop CMS which is a fork of Drupal 7. Perhaps “fork” is too simplistic a term. Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Backdrop is actually often easier than upgrading to Drupal 8. Backdrop is a good choice for non-profits and small businesses who have essential websites but don’t always need to be on the cutting edge that is Drupal 8. Backdrop CMS has made a number of improvements to make the hard things that most people use easier. Backdrop also includes the most popular and useful modules in core, which almost everyone uses, such as Views, Pathauto and Token. Backdrop CMS is guided by the philosophy of making it easy for the 80% of users rather than cater to the advanced developer (a conscious change from Drupal 7). If you’re unfamiliar with Backdrop you can take it for spin with this demo. For this upgrade I reviewed the upgrade documentation again. I recommend you do so to make sure you’ve got everything ready for your upgrade. I also suggest making backups of your database, code and files so you can retry things if you get stuck.