A few months ago, I posted here about my Drupal 7 situation. In that post, I spoke about how I had a Drupal 7 site that I relied on for my income. That I’d built it up over nearly ten years and that I had employed a recommended developer to upgrade the site to a supported version. However, the developer had come back after a lengthy delay and said the costs needed to double and the timeline had to be expanded by a year to complete the job. This had resulted in me feeling lost as I could not afford the upgrade and was losing a lot of sleep at night about losing my income stream. I had also been paying $150pm to Tag1 for legacy support, but all my site update stuff was kinda messed up, and they released a patch with a huge mailsystem bug in it, so I ended that and effectively had no update/security support whatsoever.
I want to start by giving a huge, heartfelt thank you to those who responded here. You were kind, generous, and reassuring with your advice, which helped me see a path forward.
The general consensus was that I should build a new version of my website in Drupal 10.4x, and I was excited by that prospect. I was so motivated, in fact, that I spun up a new server the very next day and set about installing a newer version of Drupal.
Things did not go well.
I come from the world of installing Drupal via cPanel. It was its point-and-click functionality that drew me in. Sure, I’ve expanded outward into server hosting as a result of running a site for so long, but things like using a terminal to do things have always been juxtaposed to what I prefer. Needless to say, when I realised I needed to use Composer to even so much as install Drupal, I was immediately put on the back foot.
I did persevere, however, assuring myself that adopting these new skills was ultimately in my interest. Given that I used ServerPilot for my server management, even installing Drupal required some customisation and hacking to get it into the public directory that ServerPilot creates.
Then it got worse.
I noticed Drupal had some migration tools built in, and that made me want to test some data migration, so I set about installing all the 10.4x versions of the modules I could. That was enlightening, as I quickly learned just how many versions of Drupal seem to be running concurrently since version 7, and how much pot luck is involved, as ever, with module availability. I was installing these via Drush (I think), which I couldn’t call globally and had to reference in a subdirectory each time, when I got to Webforms and found that it had to have its own libraries installed in the traditional way. So, all the command-line stuff felt like it was for nothing, really.
I could go into detail about my attempted migrations via the web interface, but I’m sure most of you know both how foolish and how painful that is. Highlights included leaving it running for 24 hours just to realise it had ground to a halt.
Yes, I did try migration via the command line, but at this point, everything was so messed up and my head so fried from searching through blog posts that referenced so many versions of Drupal, I couldn’t move forward and resigned to the concept I was stuck with Drupal 7 until I could afford to pay someone my yearly salary to try and upgrade it.
Now, Backdrop had been mentioned, but I reacted to that concept like a baby being fed a Brussels sprout. I did not like that idea. It caused me to have flashbacks to the days of Joomla vs Drupal and the horrors of adopting the next digital Betamax. I did take a look at their site, though, and their installation guide, just to see if I could do it via FTP, and that led me to their migration documentation and the mention of a module that can check what other modules have been ported across.
Well, that turned out to be a shocker.
I’d assumed that, even if I wanted desperately to move to Backdrop, a lack of module support would make that impossible, but the check showed that almost all of the ones I was using had already been ported, even though I was using a lot.
So, I installed Backdrop, which was really easy for me, and went through their process of migrating from Drupal 7, which got me a mostly functioning site. I mean, it had some significant issues, like major parts of the admin interface going missing, but, data-wise, it was all there.
Knowing that this still wasn’t something I felt up to doing, but clearly a lot easier to achieve, I looked for Backdrop specialists in the UK whom I could approach, which is a bit like finding someone who can build a dry-stone wall, not an ordinary skill. I found one agency in London and one just an hour away from me.
The London agency admitted that they’d never actually built a Backdrop site, only Drupal, and proceeded to give me a rough estimate I can only describe as astronomical. The more local agency, though, a meeting with them showed they were really switched on and felt Backdrop was certainly the way to go.
They quoted, at their top end, around 1/10th of what it would have cost me to migrate to a newer version of Drupal. I snapped their hand off.
At the beginning of this month, my new Backdrop-powered site launched, and, to be honest, it feels good. Not amazing. Just good. I mean, it’s Drupal, so everything kinda feels the same. Bugs in some views are still there. A few module features have gone. It doesn’t feel any faster. It feels like I’ve paid what is a significant amount of money to move sideways from something that originally cost me nothing, and then there’s that slight concern that Backdrop is just going to die a death due to the comparatively small size of its community.
I do sleep at night, though. It’s nice knowing the platform I’m on has all the focus on one version. It’s nice knowing that, for now, the plan is to keep everything interface-based. It’s nice having, for the first time, an actual developer I trust and can call upon in a crisis.
This is why I’ve titled this post with a reversal of out of the frying pan and into the fire. I don’t feel like I’m quite out of the woods yet. Part of me wonders how much more secure I would perhaps feel if I were on a supported version of Drupal, or if I would still feel like my days were numbered, with the technical side getting more daunting rather than more reassuring.
I’ve posted this because some people were asking me to update them on my findings. Ultimately, I think it’s too easy to see this as a Drupal vs Backdrop issue. The reality is, thanks to Drupal’s dominance and thanks to the open source community, we’re blessed with options. If my site didn’t take card payments, I probably would have persevered with the Backdrop migration myself. If I’d had much more funds, I probably would have eaten the cost of upgrading to a newer version of Drupal and maybe never faced the issue again. If I’d not felt ready to jump in either direction, there was still that legacy support to consider. That I’m deeply thankful for.
I’m also deeply thankful to this community, which pushed me in a few directions worth trying and helped me find a result that works.
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