Yesterday, during our weekly Backdrop CMS office hours a friend who does business development for a Drupal agency dropped in to say "hi" and ask us a few questions about Backdrop. During our chat, we asked him for his perspective on how visible Backdrop is to the wider community. His answer without hesitation was "zero."
EDIT (02/23/2022): A problematic bug was found in 1.21.0 and we have issued a new release to resolve the issue. Please, upgrade directly to 1.21.1 to get all these new features without the bug.
Backdrop core developers and project leaders are frequently called upon to make important development decisions, with very little information about how site owners and administrators typically use Backdrop CMS and how they configure it. With the release of Backdrop 1.20.0 (and later versions), we hope that situation is getting better, but we need your help.
There is a preview release available for Backdrop 1.21.0. Please use this version if you would like to help us test the features in the new version of Backdrop prior to the official release on January 15th, 2022.
Please, consider spinning up a new site or testing this preview release on a test site to help us catch any new bugs or regressions.
Notes for updating
As of May 15th, 2022, with the release of Backdrop CMS version 1.22.0, Backdrop CMS will require PHP version 5.6 or greater.
Currently, the listed requirement for Backdrop CMS is PHP 5.3.29 or greater, a version of PHP that has long since reached the end of its official life.
Backdrop CMS is about 45 days away from our 22nd on-time release, version 1.21.0. Every 4 months, we release a new version which brings with it new improvements and features to Backdrop CMS. Feature freeze is scheduled for January 1, 2022 and the release will be on Jan 15th. In the final weeks of each release cycle, there is a frenzy of activity and we try to get new improvements finalized and approved.
It’s been just over a year since our first Backdrop LIVE event, since then we’ve hosted one every 4 months and October 22-23rd will be our 4th.
We are very close to merging (this PR has now been merged) a pull request into the 1.20 branch of Backdrop CMS that will make it possible to create simple recipes in the form of modules with nothing but a .info file and a batch of config files. While not trivial to create, these "recipe" modules could in theory be downloaded from BackdropCMS.org, installed through the UI, and enabled just like any other module.
Please, join us for the next Backdrop LIVE - taking place on July 9-10 (or 11th, depending upon your time zone). This is a great chance to learn about Backdrop CMS, meet the Backdrop community, ask questions, and help plan for the future.
We've made a change in how we schedule our weekly development, outreach, and design/ux meetings to better accommodate our international participants. Participants in the southern hemisphere were experiencing 4 time changes per year due to daylight savings with a total swing of 2 hours, while participants in the USA experienced consistent start times all year.
