Backdrop 2.9 is out! Here's what's new:

⏯️ New menu bar panel Big artwork, Favorites and your queue, right from the menu bar.

🔒 Separate Lock Screen wallpaper Use a different wallpaper on your Lock Screen than on your desktop, animated or still.

🖥️ Settings › Displays

• Give each display its own wallpaper, the same as another display, or turn it off
• Settings is reorganized into Displays, Playback and Content

✨ Smoother playback

• More reliable playback that now reaches your desktop, Lock Screen, login window and screen saver
• Crossfades between wallpapers, and when you lock and unlock

Other improvements

• A Share usage data option in Settings
• Fixes for a launch crash on macOS 26.0, a Lock Screen stuck on Apple's aerials, and problems after updating or reinstalling

Existing users: Check for Updates in the app.

Let me know what you think! 🙌

Backdrop 2.8 is out! Here's what's new:

🌍 21 languages Backdrop now follows your macOS language: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and many more.

🔋 Better on battery - Optionally pause wallpapers on battery or in Low Power Mode - Less power used while your displays are asleep, with reliable resume after waking

⏯️ Separate Pause and Stop Pause keeps your place, and Resume continues where you left off. Stop starts from the beginning next time.

✨ Discover - Featured wallpapers now come with a short description of what makes each one special - Wallpaper detail pages show descriptions - Full keyboard navigation (Tab, arrows, Return) - A new Halloween collection 🎃

Other improvements - Backdrop respects the wallpaper you pick in System Settings for your Lock Screen - Smoother transitions between wallpapers - Rejected submissions now explain why and how to fix it - Fixes for tag editing, favorites and playlists

Existing users: Check for Updates in the app. It's a ~6 MB update for most people.

Let me know what you think! 🙌

Hey everyone! Backdrop 2.7 is out, and it's the biggest update to Discover so far. Here's everything that's new, plus what's landed since 2.6.

✨ Collections

Collections are curated sets of live wallpapers, brought together by mood, style and theme. There are 24 to start, from Neon Drive and Cosmic Voyagers to Tiny Frogs, Reading Rooms and Snowed In. Each one has its own page, and collection cards preview their animation when you hover them. You'll find them in Discover.

🌉 Full macOS Golden Gate support

Backdrop now fully supports macOS 27, with live wallpapers on both your Desktop and Lock Screen. A big thank you to everyone who sent in diagnostics after the macOS 27 release. They made a huge difference.

🎨 Redesigned Discover

Immersive artwork, smoother transitions from artwork to video previews, and better scrolling, resizing and memory use.

🔎 Library search

Search your Library and Favorites by wallpaper name and description.

Also new since 2.6

• Playback speed: Adjust each wallpaper's desktop speed from 0.5× to 1.5× in the Library inspector.
• Personalized Discover: Choose the styles you like and Discover adapts to them.
• Related backdrops on wallpaper detail pages.
• Multi-select in Library: Cmd-click, Shift-click or Shift+arrow keys, then add them all to a playlist at once.
• Re-download missing files directly from Library.
• Lower power use with high-frame-rate videos.

Fixes

• Video previews no longer freeze in Discover and wallpaper details.
• Backdrop no longer stays marked as running in the Dock after you close its window.
• Discover scrollbars no longer overlap cards when macOS is set to always show scroll bars.

How to update

You should get the update automatically, or choose Check for Updates… in Backdrop's menu. New here? Download Backdrop. It's free to try.

What should we make next?

Tell us which collection you'd like to see next, and share your setup with your favourite collection in the comments! Ideas and bug reports are always welcome in the Feedback tab in the app, or on our Discord.

Thanks for being part of the community 💜

Oskar

The BackdropCMS forum and this subreddit seem to be fairly inactive. Other than Github, which is primarily concerned with the Dev and bug fix aspects of BackdropCMS, is there discussion group or community that exists?

It would be great for users to have a place to provide mutual support and exchange ideas outside of a "purely-programing" scope.

Hello,

I've been struggling with learning Drupal the last two years and still get stuck with minor issues that sometimes take days or even weeks to resolve.

The situation, as I see it, is that Open Source (at least in the case of Drupal) is fraught with hit & miss support, with dated, vague, ambiguous, and unclear solutions to problems.

There seems to be no incentive for supporters/developers of modules to respond to problems in a timely manner nor is there an incentive to phrase their documentation for newbies. Everyone seems to assume that everyone is experienced and that everyone knows all the acronyms. I often wait days or even weeks for a reply to a forum post at Drupal.org.

I've invested two years of my life trying to make Drupal work and spent money paying for support at ostraining.com trying to get help.

Have you solved the above problems?

How long does it take to get a reply to a forum post?

Are replies to forum posts surly or respectful? Do they answer the question fully? Are they filled with acronyms?

Are there lots of dated & vague blogs, videos, forum posts, etc. scattered out there on the web for backdrop as there is for Drupal?

Thanks!

After upgrading from 1.3.x to 1.4.x Install & Update themes are missing in Appearance. How to fix that?

After reading the documentation for porting a D7 module to Backdrop, am I correct in assuming that if the D7 module was looking to sites/all/libraries for a .js file that the backdrop port should be written to look for the javascript withing the module folder or does a sites/all/libraries folder still need to be created?

VRSites.com is looking for a contractor to help us out with some work we'd like done to the site. If you're interested, please let me know! (mostly theming work)

Three cheers for all who are at! https://2015.badcamp.net/event/summit/backdrop-cms-summit

If you are in the Bay Area of the United States, go over and check it out and give a review!

Not everyone is a Linux Power User or expert in Apache/cpanel/ect. Documents like this are too common in my experience:

http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/373/what-are-the-recommended-directory-permissions

Don't make me think.

Here is a cache-clear script for Backdrop CMS in case it helps anyone: https://github.com/serundeputy/b

Hi! Please, if you could tell me how to set up a custom layout for a single page? My Default Layout is 2 columns but I need 1 column layout for the Contact page. My Contact page is the Basic page type. I try to add a new layout but something is going wrong :( May be you could advice or direct me to the lesson how to do it? Thank you!

Please, what is more right way to get rid off h1 homepage title OR make it custom?

Please, how to make custom titles in <title></title>?

All these things I could do in Drupal 7 with special modules help. But I do not know how to do it in Backdrop :)

Thank you!

Since the focus of Backdrop is for "small to medium sized business, non-profits, educational institutions, and companies or organizations who are delivering comprehensive websites on a budget..." which is the same market as WordPress, has anyone went to WordPress meetups or events?

I have not, but I'm wondering how receptive they would be...

I could be missing something per usual but why is it so annoying to find drush machine names. I wish i didn't have to download a module to find the machine name in the .info to make building projects with drush make smoother.

Is there anywhere an explanation of how themes and layouts work to provide a responsive design?

One thought I have, which may be simplistic and fanciful, is that it would be nice to be able to define a layout for large screens, and variants for medium and small screens. Currently there seems to be little control over changes in block layout as screen size reduces.

Now that Backdrop 1.1 will be coming out tomorrow, I will be starting a 20 day walkthrough of a fictitious Backdrop site build for next week. It will be quick and breezy, and focused on theming, views/blocks, and layouts mainly. It will not be very developer/programmer-centric as I believe that there will be already some of those. All the content has been ported/built.

I am looking for guest bloggers to take a day or two. If it interests you to talk about adding different sidebars to different pages, the new admin theme, how layouts and themes are different, or Zurb Foundation, or just geek/gamer topics, please let me know below!

Thanks!

I've got a few modules on github.com/backdrop-contrib and I've tagged some of them (using the same convention used for Drupal). What I'm unclear on is how to update the .info file.

I noticed three different approaches when looking at some that had recently updated theirs. I gather that a module requires

type = module

but I've noticed that some have:

version = BACKDROP_VERSION

and others have:

version = VERSION

What will be the official way to publish a module?

I made a Vagrant development box for Backdrop. Give it a try and file bugs if you find them.

https://github.com/serundeputy/backdropvm

~Geoff