Project present and future

Key features in version 1.17

Release date: September 15th, 2020

Backdrop 1.17 (announcement and release notes); focused on improving security, and supporting custom contexts for Layouts.

  1. Layouts: Allow support for custom contexts
  2. Layouts: Allow all blocks to have an admin label and description
  3. Image fields: Add an option to allow lazy-loading of images
  4. Expand image tokens to allow image styles (imagecache_token functionality added to core)
  5. Security: Enforce some basic password constraints (no username or email as password)
  6. Security: Use .htaccess files to further secure the config directory (when apache is used)
See the GitHub issue tracker for all 1.17 issues.

Features planned for version 1.18

Scheduled release date: January 15th, 2021

  1. Support for MySQL 8
  2. more TBD
  3. ...
See the GitHub issue tracker for 1.18 issues.

Goals for 1.x

All Backdrop 1.x releases will include new features that do not require API breaks. A subset of proposed topics are listed below. Please note: our priorities may change based on the most urgent needs of the Backdrop community.

General Goals

  1. A more intuitive administrative User Interface with each release.
  2. Improving the out-of-the-box User Experience with each release.
  3. Improve the admin interface for people on RTL languages.
  4. Ensure that a transition from Drupal 7 is as smooth as possible.
  5. More TBD!

Specific Goals

  1. Automatic core updates (manual core self-updates have been available since 1.11).
  2. A flexible reference field for content, user accounts, etc.
  3. Improve and expand multi-lingual support
  4. More TBD!

Goals for 2.0

Backdrop 2.0 will NOT be released before January 15th, 2024.

Backdrop Version 1 will continue to be the active branch of development until at least 2024. Development will continue on version 1 for at least 2 years after Drupal 7's end-of-life in November 2022. Backdrop version 1 will continue to be supported until Backdrop version 3 is released.

Backdrop 2.0 will include the removal of deprecated functions, and will most likely include changes in HTML markup.

The upgrade from Backdrop 1 to Backdrop 2 will be easier than the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS, which is already easier than the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

See the GitHub issue tracker for more 2.x issues for a set of proposed changes that cannot happen during the 1.x cycle.