Presented by
Laryn Kragt Bakker
Senior Developer
With Drupal 7 end of life approaching and about half of all Drupal sites still living on Drupal 7, many organizations are looking for next steps.
If your Drupal 7 website has largely served you well and you don't need to rethink the content or architecture dramatically, you can give it new life with a direct upgrade path to Backdrop CMS for a fraction of the cost of a move to Drupal 9.
Using the recent upgrade of Stanford Bio-X from Drupal 7 to Backdrop as a case study, we'll cover how:
- Backdrop relieves the pressure and uncertainty of Drupal 7's looming End of Life.
- Out of the box improvements in Backdrop come for free with the upgrade (think accessibility, performance, usability).
- Drupal 7 themes can be conceptually split into layout and theme, and the current theme replicated, refreshed, or replaced.
- Configuration management helps dramatically in the upgrade process.
- The relative smoothness of a direct upgrade path (compared with a migration) can leave extra room in the budget for other improvements as follow-ups.
- Content can be consolidated and terms reworked or merged after the upgrade.