Backdrop CMS 1.0 Available on Pantheon

I always feel a sense of rebirth at the beginning of each Gregorian year (sorry @c4rl), and it's fatefully appropriate for the beginning of 2015 to see the launch of Backdrop CMS 1.0. For those unfamilar, Backdrop CMS is a "full featured CMS with a focus on small-medium businesses, education, and non-profits" that is "a fork of the Drupal project". Its goal, as explained by project founders Jen Lampton and Nate Haug, is "to improve and simplify the code and architecture of Drupal 7 while minimizing the cost to the community"

As a company interested in the future of the web, we at Pantheon have been following the development of Backdrop and have worked with the Backdrop community to get Backdrop running on Pantheon. For developers who are interested in trying out Backdrop 1.0, you can try Backdrop on Pantheon right now.

For those looking for reasons to get excited about Backdrop, here are a few for you to consider that personally excite me:

• Backdrop is where talented developers like jenlampton, quicksketch, and many other folks are trying new and exciting approaches to building better tools to make a better web.
• First-class support for Configuration Management that allows site builders and developers to commit their CMS configuration changes to code for use in modern development and deployment workflows. 
• Genuine focus on the site building experience with Backdrop adaptions of Viewsand Panels/Layout modules included in the core distribution.
• Explicit upgrade paths from Drupal 7 that provide sites with significant custom Drupal 7 code to have a way forward that doesn't require a complete and costly rewrite. 
• Public roadmapping with frequent release dates ensuring that new features are regularly released and are available for Backdrop users to implement on their site. 
• A consensus-driven decision making process (modeled after the Apache Project) which is far more democratic than the benevolent dictator for life model inherited by some of our favorite open source projects. 
• Project development on GitHub which, while not without its limitations, marries fortunes with an existing vibrant developer community embracing modern development and security practices. 

As I have talked about on this blog before, it is really awesome to be living in the PHP Renaissance where new ideas for the web are being developed every day and added to our digital marketplace of ideas. Heres to hoping that Backdrop, along with Drupal 8 and WordPress, will make a better web for everyone.