AltaGrade donates the domain name "backdrop.org" to the Backdrop community

AltaGrade donates the domain name "backdrop.org" to the Backdrop community

I remember poking into Backdrop's code for the first time back in October 2014, when we tried to set it up on Drupion (the older incarnation of our company). According to a popular Russian proverb, "the first pancake is always wonky," so we ran into our first Backdrop problem right then. However, with the valuable input from the Backdrop community members we quickly made necessary changes and got it up and running. I was truly delighted to find out the user interface experience was a breeze and the code was mature enough, despite the relatively recent divergence and the Backdrop’s young age.

After an intense and thorough testing, we announced that Drupion would start officially supporting Backdrop as a viable alternative to Drupal. It was a good strategy, as some of our loyal customers running Drupal 7 projects started to express concerns about the costs of upgrading to Drupal 8 and about difficulties of adopting new layers of complexities introduced in Drupal 8. As a responsible full-service hosting company with truly intimate care for our customers, we resolved to mitigate concerns of those who wanted to make a jump from the Drupal realm to WordPress or other content management systems, by raising their awareness about Backdrop and offering assisted migration to Backdrop.

Over the years, we have assisted dozens of our customer Drupal 7 projects to successfully upgrade to Backdrop. While some of our customers have welcomed the news of postponing Drupal 7's end-of-life with a sigh of relief, it is obvious that the massive exodus from Drupal 7 is inevitable. And we are already receiving increasingly frequent requests to upgrade Drupal 7 websites to Backdrop. We gladly fulfill these requests because working on such projects gives AltaGrade an excellent opportunity to get involved with and to contribute back to Backdrop community.

Beyond technology, as the owner of a socially responsible company, I personally find the philosophy of the Backdrop project extremely appealing. The Backdrop community's admirable commitment to support non-profits, SMEs and educational institutions perfectly coincides with AltaGrade's goals: We have a considerable share of such customer organizations with various budget and resource constraints preventing them from upgrading to and maintaining Drupal 8/9 websites. As someone who started out in the 1990s building computers in my dorm room from used spare parts and using Open Source software and resources, I understand the value and significance of Open Source platforms and am happy to play an active role in the community by contributing to it as much as I can.

One of the important issues that bothered me personally was the fact that the community had to use a long and inconvenient domain name backdropcms.org, while the most intuitive and appealing backdrop.org, the domain name that anyone would organically come up with for a search query on Backdrop CMS, was in the hands of people who never cared for the project. After discussing the obstacles in obtaining the domain name, I feared the greed of the then domain name holders would only grow with time as Backdrop CMS gained more traction and popularity. Therefore, I decided to try to secure the domain name.

Today, on behalf of my company, AltaGrade I'm happy and proud to announce that the domain name backdrop.org is safely returning to its rightful owner, the Backdrop community, as an unconditional donation! The community can start using the domain name any time and in any way it deems necessary. However, due to the ICANN rules regulating the domain name transfers, its DNS management has to be tied to AltaGrade's account for the transition period. The experimental Backdrop project running currently on https://www.backdrop.org can be relocated to any of its subdomains if the community decides to start migrating from backdropcms.org to backdrop.org immediately.

Personally, I am excited to share this news of my company’s contribution to Backdrop. I hope the community shares this excitement and continues to develop and thrive for the benefit of many customers and users around the world.

Alan Mels's picture
Alan Mels
CEO & Founder
Drupal and Backdrop aficionado since bronze age.
2 comments
Alan Mels's picture

After Jen Lampton posted https://github.com/backdrop-ops/backdropcms.org/issues/594#issuecomment-... 30 minutes ago:

I just wanted to add a quick conclusion to this issue. The PMC has been speaking with SEO and Branding agencies, all who recommend against a complete switch to backdrop.org as our primary domain. Even if we were starting over fresh, the experts would still recommend backdropcms.org over backdrop.org. There are a handful of reasons that backdropcms.org is better for the community including:

- A stronger match for people searching for "Backdrop CMS" by name
- Disambiguation between people looking for Backdrop CMS and other types of backdrops
- most importantly: established "domain authority" which would take years to re-establish if we switched to anything else

The PMC does still see a lot of value in the backdrop.org domain, and we had been discussing other potential uses or it, but since we are no longer considering moving away from backdropcms.org, backdrop.org is no longer being donated to the backdrop community.

I thought to quickly update this post to give some kind of closure to the subject matter from my perspective too.

As explained on https://github.com/backdrop-ops/backdropcms.org/issues/594#issuecomment-... the last time I've heard from the Backdrop project leadership was on Mar 16, 2021:

As Tim already said PMC was going to have a formal meeting within the next 2-3 weeks anyway, when they would consider also this matter.

and while it took about two years, I am glad we have finally heard PMC's decision.

For posterity reasons, for anyone visiting this page in the future to better understand my position, I wanted to point out some nuances.

The main imperative in my actions to secure the domain name for the community had been clearly stated in the initial post above:

One of the important issues that bothered me personally was the fact that the community had to use a long and inconvenient domain name backdropcms.org, while the most intuitive and appealing backdrop.org, the domain name that anyone would organically come up with for a search query on Backdrop CMS, was in the hands of people who never cared for the project. After discussing the obstacles in obtaining the domain name, I feared the greed of the then domain name holders would only grow with time as Backdrop CMS gained more traction and popularity. Therefore, I decided to try to secure the domain name.

I went ahead with agreeing to unconditional donation only after a video-conference with Tim Erickson, Nate and Jen Lamptons and seeing their excitement and Nate's opinion that it would really be good if the Backdrop project switched to the domain name as soon as possible.

As I had already stated on the GitHub discussion page, the project has been doing just fine with backdropcms.org and can do the same way indefinitely. I do still believe that the project would gain new momentum if it was running on backdrop.org, however I can not impose my own believes on anyone.

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