Here you'll find posts about both the software and the Backdrop community.

How to make sure your Backdrop website is secure

Gigantic lock on bank safe

As time goes by, more and more of our personal information and daily activity gets drawn into the online world. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly accelerated this process. In the blink of an eye, remote working became the new standard, and people pushed into extended isolation needed to rely more heavily on the internet for entertainment and education.

Backdrop 1.18 Released!

The Backdrop community is proud to announce version 1.18 of Backdrop CMS, which was released on January 15, as scheduled. As part of our commitment to deliver the most usable product, the "minor" releases come out like clockwork, three times a year. This allows site maintainers to know when to expect updates, and they can plan accordingly. (See https://backdropcms.org/releases for more information on this)

#states AND/OR/XOR conditionals explained

Audience: developers creating forms programmatically

For many years now, I've been using #states in many of my pull requests that were around improving the admin user interface. I've found that hiding/showing form elements depending on various conditions, in many situations may result in a much better user experience for content editors and site builders using Backdrop.

Help wanted - finalizing Backdrop CMS 1.18.0

Backdrop CMS is just under a month away from our 19th on-time release, version 1.18.0. Every 4 months, we release a new version which brings with it new improvements and features to Backdrop CMS. Feature freeze is scheduled for Jan 1, 2021 (this may be adjusted for the holiday) 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. 

GHC Open Source Day 2020 - Getting Started

screen shot from Grace Hopper website that shows diverse group of women coding.

Backdrop CMS is participating in the Grace Hopper Celebration, Open Source Day 2022. This blog post was specially written for the same event in 2020.

Dear Open Source Day participants,

We are so grateful that you are volunteering your time to help us make Backdrop CMS a better product for the 1000's of small businesses and non-profits that rely on it. Over the next couple of years, some 700,000 Drupal 7 sites will be looking for a path forward as Drupal 7 reaches end of life.

Thanking Mike McCaffrey for serving on the Project Management Committee

Headshot of Mike McCaffrey

Hats off to Mike McCaffrey for his four years of service on Backdrop's Project Management Committee! Mike was a founding member of the PMC and has helped build, shape and promote Backdrop since the earliest days of the project. His BackdropCMS.org account is a whole seven years old as of writing this post, and he's the person who came up with the name Backdrop!

Backdrop is a viable alternative to Drupal 7 ...and we are here to stay 😅

This blog post is a response to some of the things previously mentioned about Backdrop in this otherwise accurate Lullabot article: Alternatives to Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9

I was glad to see Backdrop mentioned as an option for people that are facing the dilemma of what to do with Drupal 7 reaching its end of support in November 2022, but at the same time I was specifically "upset" by this bit:

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