Backdrop CMS

One of the benefits of hosting a website on Pantheon, is that the dashboard can notify you when there are available updates for the core code of your CMS (Backdrop CMS, Drupal, or WordPress).

Pantheon does this by comparing the code you are running on your own website, to the latest available code in the matching Pantheon "upstream". For Backdrop CMS websites, the Pantheon "upstream" is the backdrop-pantheon repository on GitHub.

If you've been working with Backdrop for a while, you'll notice that sometimes, a particular module, theme, layout template (or sometimes even Backdrop core) doesn't quite work right - or - perhaps it just doesn't quite work the way you'd like it to for your particular project.

Today I need to make some updates to one of my Backdrop CMS websites that hasn't been worked on for in a while. This site is hosted on Pantheon. Since I haven't written about how I update my local site before, I thought I'd take the time to document it today. I hope someone finds this helpful :)

Note, the instructions here assume the site is using my configuration management workflow for Pantheon hosted websites.

I use MAMP for my local Backdrop development on MacOS.

If you would like to do the same, first download the most recent version of MAMP and install it locally. When you are done, you should have directories for both MAMP and MAMP PRO in your /Applications directory.

To run the application, double click MAMP.app inside the MAMP directory. Once it's up and running, you should see a MAMP widget with a cute elephant icon.

When moving from traditional web hosting to managed platform-specific hosting providers like Pantheon, there are often a few tricks you'll need to work around. In this post I'll be documenting the steps necessary to move an existing website onto Pantheon.

Part of my job as a developer is making website hosting recommendations to my clients. To create a list of recommendations, I determine the appropriate plan for the website (or websites) we're working with, and present the options to my client. In order for them to make a decision based on these recommendations, each option needs to include an associated cost.

I've been meaning to write up a blog post about how to go from a HTML template (purchased from a place like https://themeforest.net) to a Backdrop theme. As a developer with only a smidge of design skill, I have found this to be a workable alternative to hiring a designer for custom work.

Below you'll find a very a rough outline of the steps I follow:

This guide is intended to help people using Cloudflare to speed up and protect their Backdrop CMS sites.

Step #1

Create three Cloudflare PageRules to exclude the Backdrop cron page and the link to run cron as an admin from Cloudflare’s caching and performance features:

The breakpoint for a Smartmens menu to go from displaying only the hamburger to displaying the whole menu is 768px by default. I had a site where I needed the breakpoint to fall at 1120px instead, here's how I changed it:

I started by copying two CSS files from backdrop core into my theme. The two files were named menu-dropdown.theme.css and menu-toggle.theme.css and are located in the core/modules/system/css/ directory.

I've written about how to manage your configuration directory in version control (Git) several times in several different places, but now that I've done it in the wild on a few different sites, I thought I'd write it up here as well.