Drupal 7 has been a robust platform for researchers to build their own complex websites for presenting and disseminating their research. While it certainly had quirks that could initially befuddle non-technical scholars, Drupal 7's minimal technical requirements made it feasible to run on inexpensive shared hosting, and the large developer community created an abundance of modules that could be reused by projects that lacked the budgets to undertake extensive custom developments.

Drupal 8 changed the landscape significantly. More than three years after its release, development for a number of key modules for digital humanities scholars has not even begun. Building sites in D8 is more expensive, and the ongoing operating costs have increased similarly. For projects that lack any technical staff at all -- let alone a team of professional "enterprise IT" type staff -- a move to Drupal 8 comes with a great deal of cost, for little benefit.

This session is an opportunity for people working on academic research sites -- or any other sort of small site run by a handful of non-technical folks -- to discuss where they plan to go now that the D7 end-of-life date has been announced. The presenter will describe her early experiments moving sites to Backdrop, a Drupal 7 fork with a focus on usability by less-technical teams, and encourage others to talk about what has worked and what hasn't in their own investigations into how their sites might evolve.