Feature

Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal; it’s a Content Management System for the non-profits and small-to-medium sized businesses of the world. As Drupal moves itself closer to the Enterprise market, Backdrop CMS emerges to meet the needs of the little guys.

The goal of the project is to improve and simplify the code and architecture of Drupal 7 while minimizing the cost to the community. Backdrop was forked from an early version of Drupal 8, just before things started to change drastically: before the adoption of Symfony, before the conversion to PSR-0, and before widespread rewrites of many subsystems.
When Backdrop CMS is released, it will contain many of the same major new features as Drupal 8: configuration management, Views module in core, and rich text editing, to name a few. Each may have a few features the other does not, but the main difference between the two products is the underlying code.

We like to think of Backdrop CMS as the next logical step in Drupal's evolution. If you've worked with Drupal 7 code, the code in Backdrop will look very familiar to you. Modules and themes are written the same way as they were in Drupal 7, with a few minor improvements. You'll spot the differences caused by CMI and the new layout system, but you'll be able to find your way around the files easily. Drupal 8, on the other hand, is quite different.

When Drupal 7 was first released, adoption was slow. It was so slow that the overall number of Drupal installs actually declined for a while. A lot of contributors complained about the scope of changes, and Drupal 7 versions of modules and themes were painfully slow to appear. Yes, there are some complaints after every major release. Change is hard. But big changes are significantly harder.