Drupal 7 -> Drupal 8 Alternatives

Caught between a Drupal 7 Rock and a Drupal 8 Hard-place?

Want to get away from Features, ‘pogo stick' configuration menus, and other D7 pains? Not ready to rewrite your custom modules, learn Composer/Symfony2/Vagrant, and hire more software engineers for D8?

Backdrop and Drutopia

Backdrop CMS is a Drupal 7 fork, faster and less-complex than Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 with Panels, Views, and Configuration Management built into core. It offers to extend the Drupal 7 paradigm without a step function increase in framework complexity. Almost two years old with five releases, Backdrop is the leading alternative to Drupal 8.

Jennifer Lea Lampton will explain the motivation behind Backdrop, its architecture, and new core features such as a Rich-Text editor, automatic URLs and page redirects, and a browser for directly installing new add-ons.

Jen is co-founder of the Backdrop CMS and owner of Jeneration (http://www.jeneration.com/), a Drupal agency. She has been a Drupal developer for over ten years, former Drupal 8 Twig "initiative" lead, Drupal usability team member, BADCamp lead organizer, and DrupalCon 2010 organizer. She has also worked for Chapter Three and PagePoint.

Drutopia is a very new and different alternative, offering Drupal 8 "co-op style." We will discuss this briefly and get feedback on interest to have this be the topic for our December meeting.