 I'm gonna spend a couple of minutes to tell you a few things about myself, it might sound boring or irrelevant, but bear with me, I'm getting somewhere. So there's a few facts about me, I was born and raised in central Greece, and I come from a poor family. And that is relevant though because this is worse. I'm mainly self-taught, I wasn't originally a developer, I was taught the basics of programming but I never got into developing. I started my own IT business in Greece. Soon after I became like 20 after the army service that I had to do, which is a thing in Greece. And my business was a small local business, I basically had no budget for it. But I still wanted to build a website for my business and I was introduced to the world of CMS or someone brought it up with me. And I did some resets and I came, like the first results that came up were Drupal WordPress and Dremla. I did some resets, people were saying that Drupal was really difficult and I shouldn't touch it, but I liked the challenge, so. Yeah, I built my website with Drupal and then I started getting involved with the community, so the motto says come for the software state for the community, that's what happened with me as well. Then come 2009, the economic crisis starts in the EU. I struggled with my business as so many others in the southern parts of Europe, especially. And finally in 2013 I had to shut down my business. In 2014 I moved to Australia, I left behind my wife and my two year older daughter at the time. I started working as a cleaner when I came to Australia and at the same time I was building my IT business slowly again, finding new customers and, yep, starting from scratch. In 2016 I was invited to present on Backdrop CMS in Drupal South, World Coast which was my first Drupal event ever. And that's where I met Con from Salsa Digital. I was invited at the beginning of 2017 to start working as a contractor for Salsa Digital and became permanent around like maybe five, five to six months later. Since 2018 I've been working as a level two level three application support engineer for CMS. And in 2020 I became permanent resident in Australia. But I left to come to Greece because of COVID, because my mom's really old, my wife's mom's really old and they needed support, so I've been stuck here since. But looking forward to come to Melbourne again in a month or so, like maybe three and a half weeks now. And you might be wondering why are you telling us all that Greg. I am an economic migrant, I have lost the best years of my daughter because of an economic crisis happening in one part of the world. I'm very sensitive when it comes to socio-economic differences. And it's my understanding by moving from a less fortunate country which was great to a more fortunate country that people tend to live in their own bubbles and we make many assumptions with regards to multiple things when it comes to it. When it comes to education, when someone has to start work, for example, or what being from a different economic background means for them. So yeah, different things. When it comes to programming and open source and triple I'm very passionate about UX. I came in Somniac when I was 17 years old, so I don't sleep much. When I don't sleep, I contributed open source. And I honestly believe that open source is a noble cause and it's one of the things that will save the world. And with that, we'll start the session which is the main part of the session which is the introduction to backtrack CMS. Towards the end of this presentation, we'll have a Q&A session which I'll stop recording then so that we can speak more freely so that it's not on record. It's my experience from other events that people speak up more freely when not on record. So I'll allow for that to happen. So what is backdrop? Backdrop is basically a free and open source funded management system that helps people build modern, extensible, comprehensive websites affordably. And the target audience mainly is small to medium sized businesses, nonprofits and education. You can find more information at backdropcms.org. Backtrack CMS is a fork of Drupal. The fork was announced back in 2013. There's an article which is called Don Panic and it was written. It was basically the announcement by the person that forked by one of the people that founded the project basically. And I'll provide the link so that you can view it and read it at your own pace. But the main fact is that we need to keep these numbers in mind. 2013 end of 2013 is when backdrop CMS is like the fork is being announced and then the first release of backdrop is in January 2015, which is about the first year I was in Australia. There's one graph in that article which I've put here, which I would like to discuss. And that sort of like that was created back in 2013. And it was sort of like predicting what will happen with the introduction of the symphony and composite dependencies in the Drupal space. Basically, Nate said that as most felt there were two portions of the Drupal community when it comes to this context, to this aspect, there would be the highly skilled, a very experienced developers, professionals working with enterprise with businesses with big budgets, etc. And then there would be small thinker is we can pick or what you call it we can warriors or self learners or like in my situation a site owner which was tech savvy enough to set up their own site and you know play with it. The prediction there was that introducing more dependencies and barriers when it comes to like to tools that you need to learn would actually decrease the adoption rate. And then the hope was that with the the production of backdrop, we would be able to preserve a big amount of this audience that would otherwise lead to other solutions. So, the, the plea there at the point or the idea was that both products would continue and then Drupal would focus on the enterprise as it was intended or for ambitious experiences and then backdrop with with cater for, I don't know, let's call it the less ambitious people. Again ambition is something relative. So, these are actual actual graphs from Drupal.org from the Drupal project using spaces. One is the one that I grabbed, as it was from the web archive back in 2013 when the fork was announced. And you will see around here around 2021 is where Drupal seven enters the space and it's like it goes upwards from their one. And then the second graph is as it is now like I think I grabbed the screenshot yesterday or the day before, and it shows a decline as it was predicting so you will see that this thing that was predicted in 2013 is actually becoming a reality. One fact is that Drupal seven has been the most successful version of Drupal so far, it brought the community from 30, sorry 300,000 sites to over a million, I think it was close to 1.1 on 1.2 at some point. Even until a couple of weeks ago, if you combined Drupal eight, Drupal nine and Drupal 10 installations, still Drupal seven installations were more would kind of counting more installations there. Yet all these years, we have Drupal cons and you hardly ever see any chance be given to D7 related sessions. So it means that the D7 site owners for whatever reason they chose to stick with D7. I'm not examining that right now. They were being basically neglected or, you know, treated as second category citizens but by the community. In fact, if there was any D7 session, it would be to actually push people to upgrade or migrate to D8, D9. So, here comes backdrop CMS now which is yet another tool. And we don't see ourselves as a competitor to Drupal. You have the low sort of like portion of the market that would go to solutions like Wix and Squared Space and then you have the most popular CMS in the market, which is WordPress. And then the more complex projects and websites would choose to go and the enterprise sites I should say would go with Drupal. So the backdrop positions are sort of somewhere in between as a solution in between those to the main players, WordPress and Drupal. So the backdrop CMS project was founded initially by Jen Lampton and Nate Lampton. Some of you that have been in the Drupal community for a long time will already know the names. I will provide again the links to their user profiles in D.org to sort of like get an idea of the contributions that these people have provided over the years. But it is a fact that both of these developers, both of these people are Drupal developers. They've been doing training for years. Actually, Nate was, I started learning from the Lullabot videos. That's how I learned Drupal basically. And so his face and his voice was familiar. They are core contributors to Drupal. Nate is responsible for the CK editor implementation in D8 before Symphony was introduced. Jen, just as an example, was at some point leading, I think, the TWIG initiative in D8. And both of them have been advocating for Drupal. The point that I want to make is that backdrop CMS was founded and is being maintained by people who love Drupal. One of them is myself. As I mentioned earlier, I work mainly in my day job is with Drupal 7 and now moving to Drupal 8. In Drupal 9, my day job or what puts money, sorry, food on the table is not backdrop. It's Drupal. Yet my contributions are with backdrop and I'll explain that. I'm happy to explain that. So when the project started, we decided to form a committee that would steer the project. We modeled the Apache project management committee. Currently, these are the members, yours truly as well here of the project management committee, we are seeking to grow this committee and over time, there have been people that came and left. The initial idea was that each member would serve for two years, but there's some of us that have been in the committee for multiple years now. The general idea again is that each person would be a constituent for a portion of the community and we're trying to sort of like reach wide by having representatives of ideas or values of different takes of life, ethnicities, level of education, ages, what have you. So we are trying to get a wide spectrum of representatives from the community so that their voice is being heard in the committee that steers the project. So to make sure that there's no big surprises for any specific group during the lifetime of the project. The responsibilities of the project management committee are to handle conflict resolution to oversee the direction of the project to ensure that we follow the project philosophy. And if ever it is necessary to change the to come into agreement and change the project philosophy accordingly. But in order to do that, we had to define the project philosophy. We only also formulated these set of principles that backdrop should be easy to upgrade and keep backwards compatibility as much as possible. Write code that the majority can understand and work with include features that benefit the majority, make sure that backdrop can be customized and extended by developers. Make sure that we keep sites people and the software secure. Be performant and make sure that the software runs on very low system requirements, even in shared hosting. Always release some time on a schedule and of course that the software remains free and open source forever. This is the backdrop mission says backdrop CMS enables people to build highly customized websites affordably through collaboration open source with the keywords here being websites. As in plain websites, not that you cannot do headless with backdrop you can do that but our target audience or preferences that people build simple sites with that and another keyword is affordably so with as less cost as possible. And how do you make a web development or the ownership of a site more affordable is that you make sure that you increase the out of the box functionality, you improve the user experience and the developer experience. You decrease server requirements. Make updates less more effortlessly automatic if possible and upgrades should be faster and easier and more things, of course, when it comes to release schedule we have we released three times a year that that's for the minor releases that get new features every January, May and September 15, and we have always been sticking with this on schedule for the past years. Since its initial release backdrop has been 22 on time releases according to that schedule. The most recent release has been in January 15 this year, and the upcoming releases. And I will provide the links to these the roadmap, as you can see in the milestones that you can take them out. One of the most frequent questions that we get asked this, what about security. Well, we work closely with the Drupal security team, actually to two of our members of the members of our security team are members of the Drupal security team as well. We coordinate the releases so if there is a change security change that needs to happen in Drupal that affects backdrop as well, we make sure that the releases come out at the same time, same day. But we also have our own security team independently we have our own workflows of reporting security issues and you know we make releases security releases of our own that most likely don't apply to Drupal for both core and country. When it comes to contributed security, the, there is a process for people to be accepted to get into the contribution space. And one of the terms in the agreement that in the, in the agreement that they have to stay that state that they agree, says that the security team is authorized to fix any contribute problems and create security releases without consent from the maintainers of the module. This is a difference in the model that is being used between contributing Drupal and backdrop. We also try to make it easier to maintain contribute projects we have formulated a theme called the bug squad, which is a group of trusted members of the contributed group. We also have other maintainers state stay on top of minor bug fixes and usability improvements. So, if there's any issue that has a pull request, and that has been a TV seat for like three, four weeks or more. People can report that to the bug squad the bug spot will review the code, unless it is a it is a major change in code. So it's great to to manage that core that that put if they agree and then create a new release. This takes the burden off of specific people from, you know, life happens, maintainers might have life of the wrongs and they might not be able to solve a security issue or get to their issue queue, and we have seen that happen a lot of times in Drupal space. Some maintainers hold their modules as you know their babies that is the thing that people used to describe it, they are not letting go and at the same time they're not doing a good very good job but maintaining it. So we, this is our solution, our idea. So basically the bug squad is comprised of three people, but as the community grows we are seeking to add more people to help out with with, you know, crowdsourcing sort of like making a shared responsibility the maintenance of the entire contrib space. And of course same as Drupal has modules themes but we also have a another a third top layer top level notion of an add on which is layout templates or layouts for short. This is a little bit of a statistic, I didn't have the time and it's a very complex matrix to update very often. So this is not the most up to date but this is the top 100 Drupal 7 modules. And it's a status to give you an idea of how many of them have been ported already, how many are underway, how many have been included in core or not required in Drupal core. And why I'm showing this is that this goes back to the out of the box experience less things to install less things to configure. Again, this is just a rough idea of, you know, a list of modules that have been included in back to core and when I say that I don't mean that we just copied the core, the code of the modules and core, we have integrated the features of these modules in the system in the core. So there's very tight integration and streamline as well. Some statistics. There's over 900 projects in GitHub and out of these over 700 have official releases the rest of them are either better or in progress to be ported. So some statistics about the community. These are the official download count, and how many sites the have been built in with backdrop. The amount compared to Drupal space is very small, of course, because we are very terrible at doing marketing. And one thing to note, and this is the statistics pages that we have been steadily over 2000 installations after January this year. But if we go back to about a year you will see that out of the 2000 some installations five to 600 sites have been built in the last year over the course of nine years so we see a big increase in people moving sites or building new sites with battle. Over the last year. There's close to 5000 members on registered in backdrop CMS.org over 150 contributors, and the contrib group has over 100 members. So if you tie that to these statistics, it's close to 1000 projects, which means that there's a handful like every, every on average every contrib developer has put it at least, or developed at least 10 modules over the past few years. And that's because of the similarities between the code base from juggle seven and between juggle seven backdrop. And there are some statistics about supporting organizations service providers and contractors available for hire. This is where the community needs we have a chat on Zulu every week we hold two meetings. These are UTC times I should have converted them to OZ times. So every week, we alternate between a design and UX meeting and an outreach meeting. And then the second meeting is a core development meeting and then every Wednesday, there's a two hour slot of office hours, which means that anyone can come with their questions. Anything they want to ask anything, like if they even if they have a problem with their sites, they can screen share with us and we can help them or brainstorm. And we also have backdrop live events which are sort of like these, as I said, conference events where the presentations are not being reported is just discussions around topics, and we had a recent one just this past weekend. And here's a few links where you can find us the site the forum, the GitHub repo, the documentation and API site, and some social links as well.