The Drupal Security Team's announcement that they would end official and community support for Drupal 7 in January of 2025 created a frustrating challenge for the many nonprofits who have invested years of resources creating a home in that platform.
Enter Backdrop CMS, a fork of the Drupal 7 codebase that is actively supported by an enthusiastic community and that presents a sustainable path forward for years to come.
Trick question! There is no way to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9/10 (aka Modern Drupal). You have no choice but to rebuild from scratch. Depending on the complexity of your site, that can be quite a cost.
Moreover, Modern Drupal is geared toward enterprise-level organizations. We only recommend it for our larger clients with dependable annual technology budgets, as the security updates alone can be expensive.
Additionally, the structural benefits of Modern Drupal are mainly geared toward developers. When you reach the finish line of your Drupal 10 rebuild, your site will look the same as it did in Drupal 7.
For a typical Giant Rabbit client, that's a lot of money to spend for such little tangible improvement for site admins and end users.
Glad you asked. That's a question we'll explore! If your site is a so-called "brochure" site, where you're mainly displaying content to users and don't require much in the way of custom logic, WordPress can be a great choice.
If, however, your website has more complicated needs (users logging in, a store, data-heavy, fielded content types), we highly recommend keeping your website in a CMS with more consistent coding practices like Drupal 7, which means an upgrade to Backdrop.
Backdrop CMS is our go-to platform for clients with complex Drupal 7 sites who want a stable, supported codebase for sustainable development.
As we mentioned, Backdrop is a fork of Drupal 7. That means that the Backdrop core team started making their improvements right on the Drupal 7 codebase, and are committed to being free and Open Source.
One huge benefit to this approach is that we can upgrade your site to Backdrop CMS. We need to run some updates on your modules and themes to make sure they're compatible with the changes Backdrop has made, but the work is a drop in the pond compared to the work it takes to rebuild a site from scratch in either Modern Drupal or WordPress.
In fact, an upgrade to Backdrop costs roughly one-third of what it takes our team to rebuild from scratch, and that's not the only highlight:
A move to Backdrop means a move to a platform that centers organizations where resources aren't unlimited. The Backdrop Core Team is committed to sustainability. This means a focus on backwards compatibility, and a mindful approach to significant changes. (Check out their Philosophy page to hear this in their own words.)
Backdrop is an inclusive and welcoming open source community, and we contribute work back to the project with every site upgrade we perform. When we upgrade a module or theme and release it to the Backdrop community, we credit the clients whose sites made that work possible.