How To

A demonstration of the Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS upgrade process.

I've worked on a handful of Drupal 7 to Backdrop upgrades. While I usually follow a standard process, there are always some peculiar challenges with each one.

I will provide a demo of a fairly basic upgrade from a sample Drupal 7 website, but will leave lots of room to give an overview of how to deal with some common issues, and for questions.

Demo module can be used for other purposes than its name might suggest. We will talk on how it can help you for testing core or contrib modules.

I plan to show examples of some useful hooks and preprocess functions that allow developers to interact with, extend or modify Backdrop programmatically, through small custom modules or within the theme's template.php, with minimal knowledge of PHP. Some of these include:

In short, config recipes are simple modules that add functionality to your site mostly by adding some prepared configuration. They do not add new features that are not already available through Backdrop Core or existing contrib modules. 

Available config recipes at this time:

Introduction

Bee is the command line tool for Backdrop that is developed specifically for Backdrop and is being actively developed. It runs on Linux based systems (including MacOS) but not Windows.  It has a number of functions in common with Drush and Brush but there are a few key gaps.

The views module is a powerful tool that allows site administrators to create complicated and dynamic displays of their content without writing any code or knowledge of database queries. 

• Create a basic view
• Filter your data with views
• Sort your data with views
• Rewriting your data in views
• What happens if there is no data in your view (no results)
• Contextual Filters
• Relationships
• Views header and footer
• View pagers

My colleague Philip Stier has been working on a series of webinars about image optimizations in Drupal, and I thought it would be nice to do a quick overview of some of the parallel ways to optimize images in Backdrop. Some of the techniques are identical, and I'll mention a few others as well.

Maintaining optimized images is important for your site's accessibility and usability on different screen sizes and devices.

Over the last few months I decided to start building some of the decoupled blocks that I've been hearing about at Drupal events.  After getting the Drupal version working I wondered about how I would put the same block into a Backdrop site.  So I changed the module to be a Backdrop module instead of a Drupal module.

After that project I had a Backdrop site that had information I wanted to share inside a Drupal site.  I reversed the process, making a decoupled Backdrop block first and then changing the module to be a Drupal module.

Let's have a discussion about SEO.  I've tried to make use of my librarian training in the past to game search results.  I'll offer some of my experiences with search console, analytics and data studio.  All Google products.

When I worked for the library we had a language learning database that we called Free Rosetta Stone but people couldn't find it.  So I went to work on the node for it. 

Over the last few months I decided to start building some of the decoupled blocks that I've been hearing about at Drupal events.  After getting the Drupal version working I wondered about how I would put the same block into a Backdrop site.  So I changed the module to be a Backdrop module instead of a Drupal module.

After that project I had a Backdrop site that had information I wanted to share inside a Drupal site.  I reversed the process, making a decoupled Backdrop block first and then changing the module to be a Drupal module.