Front End Tooling for Backdrop CMS
Sharpening your tools is an important part of any developers life cycle and can help you deliver solid, maintainable sites using best practices, efficiently and on budget. The tools I'll discuss in this post:
Build a sub-theme of Basis, the default frontend theme of Backdrop
This is a slightly updated/modified version of this article, written by Wes Ruvalcaba (@wesruv), the creator of Basis (the default frontend theme of Backdrop). It is being republished here with his kind permission. Thanks Wes! ❤️
An approach to theming a site in Backdrop
In Backdrop, as in Drupal, there usually seems to be more than one way of doing the same thing, and in this blog contribution I am not suggesting that this is THE way to theme your site, it just happens to be a way I have used with some success.
#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.
Backdrop Contribution Day - April 20, 2019
This weekend Jen Lampton will be working with a group of high school students, in the Oakland area, on contributing to Backdrop CMS. In support of these efforts, we have decided to announce an informal Backdrop CMS contribution day. If you are a supporter of the Backdrop project and have been looking for an opportunity to contribute, Saturday would be a great opportunity to jump in and help us with a task, regardless of where you are.
Backdrop Meeting Notes (Dec 27, 2018)
The outreach meeting was cancelled today so that we could focus on reviewing issues before the upcoming feature freeze. Issues related to outreach for Backdrop CMS can be found in the Backdrop.org issue queue.
It's not too late to schedule your own Backdrop Birthday Party for January 15th (we'll be 4 years old and releasing v.1.12.0 on the same day).
Introducing Kalabox for Warpspeed Backdrop Development
Stardate 47634.44: We’ve encountered the Backdrop CMS, and found it to be the fastest way to make a flexible and modern website. Using the code and concepts we know from Drupal 7, it optimizes web development for 2016.
However, we are perplexed why our development workflows are still archaic and barbaric. To right this wrong, we must violate the Prime Directive and bring technology from the future.
Kalabox. Engage.
Become an advocate for a new feature in Backdrop core
Is there a feature that you would REALLY like to see get into the next release of Backdrop CMS, but you don't think you have the skills to write the code for it? Then consider becoming an advocate for that issue.
The Backdrop community has been experimenting with an "advocacy" program, in which we ask community members to identify an issue they feel strongly about, and volunteer some time to help push that issue forward. Often times, the key to moving an issue forward is the involvement of a single individual that is willing to:
Backdrop Meeting Notes (Jan 3, 2018)
Here are some notes from the Design / UX and Development meetings that took place on Thursday Jan. 3rd. These notes are not comprehensive, but we have included links to watch the meetings or read the agenda near the end of this post.
Creating pull requests against core: the easy (noob) way
I do not consider myself a coder. My contributions in the issue queues both in drupal.org as well as in the GitHub repository of Backdrop CMS had very little to do with actual code. That was until a few months ago Geoff (a.k.a. @serundeputy) showed me a way to create PRs though the GitHub UI that I find very easy (although not very coder-like).