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I have been a part of the open source world since the late 1990's and watched many projects fork as the diverging needs of its users become impossible to address in one code base. I hope that everyone in the Drupal community will come to realize and appreciate that the forking of Drupal is a natural part of its evolution.

Whether Backdrop ends of being a useful fork for a meaningful number of users remains to be seen, but I do believe that fork-time has come. Indeed, I have thought for some time that D8 really should have been a fork of Drupal since it makes so many enormous changes and really does increase significantly the emphasis on the needs of larger organizations (e.g., enterprise). Nonetheless, the forking of Drupal is a good thing, I believe.

Given what Jen and Nate have written about the purpose of Backdrop, I look forward to seeing a roadmap for its future.  As a competent site builder and mostly incompetent developer, I hope that Backdrop emphasizes the following:

+ Configuration management. I spend far too much time managing the updating of code from dev to test to production and dealing with the huge PITA caused by the storage of configuration in the database.
+ Outdated documentation. There is a lot of documentation for Drupal. Most of it is outdated and sometimes misleadingly so. Writing a lot of documentation once is really not all that useful. Writing less documentation and keeping it current is much more useful.
+ Too many contrib modules that do the same thing (or try to), that are outdated and are not maintained, and that are poorly documented, if at all. The Backdrop community should set a higher standard for contrib modules (and themes) so that ordinary users do not spend so much time trying to figure out how to use contrib modules and how to deal with buggy contrib modules.  Establishing some level of QA for contrib and end-of-lifing modules that are not maintained would be a huge service to users.
+ Too many different base themes with no meaningful contribution of subthemes. For any new user of Drupal, figuring out which base theme to use is a nightmarish burden. Finding subthemes that implement each base theme (beyond the starterkit base theme provided by the theme's contributor) makes choosing even more difficult.
+ The authoring experience needs to be simplifiable without requiring the installation of multiple contrib modules. In most cases, content authors need far fewer options than are presented by the standard Drupal node creation page.
+ Maintaining upgradeability or even migratability to the D8 path is really not that important and probably is unrealistic. Just make it as easy as possible to get the data out of the DB.
+ Performance. We all know Drupal is a resource hog. I don't understand all of the reasons that contribute to the poor performance of Drupal on a basic Linux instance. Hopefully, Backdrop can address some of these issues.

Thanks for your efforts and for opening your blog to comments.

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