Backdrop CMS sites
Backdrop CMS as a first-class citizen: the same panel tasks as your Drupal sites, automatic caching and cron, and bee — Backdrop's own CLI — next to drush.
Backdrop CMS is the community fork of Drupal 7 — the same content model and admin instincts you know from Drupal 7, kept alive on modern PHP, with the most popular Drupal 7 modules (Views, Date, Entity reference, Redirect and more) built straight into core.
On a BOA instance a Backdrop site is a first-class citizen: it lives on
its own Backdrop platform, shows up in your Ægir control panel with the
same tasks as your Drupal sites (Verify, Clone, Migrate, Backup,
Restore), gets the same automatic caching and cron, and answers to the
command line — both to bee, Backdrop's own CLI, and to the drush
you already use.
The pages below cover the everyday work, both built-in upgrade paths (Drupal 7 in one task, Drupal 6 in two), and the database conversion task that clears the way for upgrading imported sites.
Good to know
beeis to Backdrop whatdrushis to Drupal — and on BOA you have both. Trybee statusnext todrush @example.com status.- Backdrop stores site configuration as files, not only in the database. Those files live inside your site's private directory and ride along with every backup automatically.
- Cron just works. The panel triggers Backdrop's secure web cron on schedule; you don't set anything up and you shouldn't add your own crontab entry for it.
Your Backdrop site day to day
The everyday jobs with bee and drush, where Backdrop keeps its configuration, and what's already handled for you: cron, caching, backups.
Upgrading from Drupal 7
The built-in Drupal 7 → Backdrop upgrade converts a copy while your existing site keeps serving untouched — with a per-module report before anything is created.
Upgrading from Drupal 6
The two-step chain for Drupal 6 sites: a built-in Drupal 6 → Drupal 7 task that carries your CCK field data, then the standard Backdrop upgrade on the copy.
Converting utf8 databases to utf8mb4
The one-step task that converts 3-byte utf8 tables to utf8mb4 — it probes first, reports an honest no-op when there's nothing to do, and backs up before changing anything.