Drupal 8 vs. Backdrop

Great writeup, it pretty much reflects my views as well. One caveat, I don't believe twig is being ported over, but they're thinking of writing something similar.

Whats worse is that it won't be compatible with Drupal at all, so they're pretty much making a new CMS based on bad industry practices. These were ingenious hacks when PHP 3 was out, but that was over 10 years ago. The idea of turning the clock back is bad.

The FUD that backdrop spreads is toxic to the greater Drupal community and helps re-enforce why external people don't like drupal in the first place. My hope is that instead of people flocking to backdrop, they will learn new programming constructs and become better programmers.

Drupal 8 pretty much resolves all of these complaints. I'm really excited to see it come about. As long as the community stays behind Drupal 8, I think we'll see a platform poised for even greater success.

I 've actually expanded on this argument today over at http://pingv.com/blog/drupal-8-as-an-intuitive-platform. In short, Drupal 8 is going to be a far more intuitive and approachable platform than Drupal 7 ever was. Drupal 7 is just a muddy mess of procedural spaghetti code...

Totally agree with you. Forking Drupal is a bad idea and come on backdroppers, embracing Symfony components is the smartest move.
Nevertheless, it is not a matter of whether backdrop will stop to exist but just when it will vanish.

"Most people who hung with Drupal from 1-6 largely were hobby coder / hackers, and the shift into OOP and structured coding has had somewhat of a Darwin effect on the developer base, survival of the fittest."

Clearly the changes are good for the developers and owners of the tiny by important minority of Drupal sites where there is enough funding for professional developers. The majority of Drupal sites out there were made by hobbyists (or professionals in the way small WP 'web designers' are professional) who picked Drupal over Wordpress, and who find maintenance a headache (see the d.o. support forums to confirm this). This mass of users. who are the key to Drupal's wide adoption, but who will never make Drupal shops rich, are still being recruited by Drupal Gardens. I fear when their D8 sites 'blow up' they will be even further out of the depth than they were with D6. I hope I am wrong.

Drupal has already followed the money and taken the enterprise route. In a way the Backdrop fork is too late. The one thing that remains is to more frank in presenting Drupal as an OS enterprise solution which great at what it does, but is not a good choice for small site builders.

I largely agree with this. I also make a living mainly from looking after Drupal sites which have pretty much gone wrong, albeit as freelance support. It is partly the clients' fault for picking the cheap / offshoring / confident-sounding Drupal 'experts' over the well-known but prohibitively expensive Drupal shops.

So with Drupal 8 it could go two ways: the client base pf the type who lack the funding to make and maintain a Drupal site well will flee to a more suitable platform (in which case the 'professionalisation' of D8 will do them a favour). Or the changes to D8 will mean they get burned even more badly by the developers who know Drupal less well than they pretend or believe, and who get business but bid unrealistically low.

But I feel sorry for the owners of 'craptastic' sites (this week a client told me his Drupal site was like a bad marriage), and if Drupal core does not help out the people who have invested and feel locked in to a bad Drupal site, and who could not afford a Wordpress migration (for example), maybe Backdrop will.

I've always felt that I would move on from Drupal once I was ready... Thought Drupal was for and suited to that crowd. Very curious as to why people that fully know what they are doing are hoping to change that (what has made Drupal as successful as it is (?)) and not just use something else?

Question: do your employees that "dragged kicking and screaming into Drupal" share your enthusiasm for the changes in D8? Are they excited about Backdrop?

Cheeky-ness aside, I've heard frowing talks of 'exit straties' since D7... I fully agree that Backdrop is too late. Before I knew what it was, I was hoping it might be to D7 or D8 what Pressflow was to D6 :(

I disagree with this, for the simple reason that these are guys who know Drupal well enough to realize that NEW Drupal 7 and probably Drupal 6 sites are being created and it will be impractical to upgrade them to Drupal 8 when it comes out.
I see many developers having to decide whether it will be a good idea to create new Drupal 6 or 7 sites or abandon Drupal altogether. The fact is Drupal 8 is going to cause the problems Drupal 7 created for Drupal 6, which is basically mess up development of third party modules, and waste all the time invested in mastering Drupal 6 and 7. Once bitten twice shy.

As experienced Drupal 7 developers get to know BackdropCMS better they will decide whether to stick with their Drupal 7 investments and skills or abandon Drupal 7 altogether. Something like this may determine whether the Drupal community stays together or breaks up and Drupal is more of a community than a product.

My Drupal skills are not that great but It already makes me feel better about creating new Drupal 7 sites.

Take a look at the Services module https://drupal.org/project/services. It has been discontinued for Drupal 6 and what is worse is that the links required for anyone who wants to see what they can do to fix it were simply removed from the main page. I had to Google a lot to see what was going on and what I could do if I wanted to continue it using. Although some patches were tendered the test suite required to verify it for Drupal 6 was not good enough and no one had the time to take it up as most efforts are going into Drupal 8. Given how REST is so important you need to ask how much one can rely on a team who can discontinue such a critical module. Issues like these don't inspire confidence.

Have you noticed that it is now that Drupal.org is switching to Drupal 7, 3 years after its release ? https://drupal.org/node/2085755.
It is irrelevant how good Drupal 8 is or might turn out to be.

Frankly if anyone is at fault here it is Drupal core contributors - that means Dries and Co - neglecting the concerns of those who need to preserve their D6 and D7 investments. I feel that people would be happier to learn Drupal 8 and contribute to it if they were convinced that their D6 and D7 investments wouldn't go to waste. They already did this once and got burned. They can't be expected to do it again.

PS. The are you human thingy requires too much 3rd party Javascript in these days of NoScript

@Frank thanks for persisting through the are you a human thingy! It is the most effective thing I've found for stopping spam, though -- with Mollom we were getting batches of 50 - 100 spams through every day, while at the peak it was blocking ~7000 spams per day!?! AYAH has it down to maybe 3 or 4 a day.

Very good points about the cost of upgrades, and Services module. I totally agree that Services is necessary for a lot of integration work, mobile app support, and more -- it's a shame nobody is stepping up to maintain it in D6 (but understandable). That is going into core in D8, though, so that's another point in D8's favor.

The cost of upgrades is a major, major problem with Drupal these days, and D7 -> D8 is looking to be as big or bigger a jump as D6 -> D7. I'm actually drafting up a post about the cost of ownership compared to value in Drupal, as compared to other platforms. This has long been perhaps the biggest tangible cost to running a Drupal site -- the cost of upgrades. I keep hoping it's going to get better, but if anything it's getting worse, at least up to D8.

Once Drupal is a Symfony app, will future upgrades be less painful? Time will tell. But I'm guessing that with much better object-orientation, future upgrades can be a lot easier -- if well implemented, modules can simply inherit the updated base objects with potentially no changes whatsoever.

So I guess I take your points as the reason why Backdrop is a bad idea -- the very issues you raise with Drupal are what I hope Drupal 8 will largely resolve -- and Backdrop is likely to perpetuate.

As a programmer I have university degree. And I want to warn another programmers about drupal.
I have been working with Drupal for 4 last years.
Working as site builder and programmer.
And I want to warn new programmers about what is not said.
Drupal is not for programmer's use.
It is for web masters' use.
You can think like this: "I will learn how to create the modules and I will be creating good web sites for money".
But it is not like this.
The customers don't want your custom code in their web sites. :( .
They want site built only on base of drupal.org modules. It is an official ideology. They call it "the drupal way".
And this could be done only by advanced tuning of hundreds of modules.
To understand how to do this you would need years and years. And this is nott even about programming. You will not be programming doing your drupal work.
And so you will be turning to a weaker programmer.
And when you would learn your knowledge then a new version appears and you would need to learn again.
Now Drupal 8 is too complicated to waste your programming abilities on it.
It has no sence.
It is my experience.
I wasted my programming time and skills for the trap with name drupal.
Now I am leaving from Drupal.