It is 6 weeks since I last posted anything on this site so now I must make up for it and record a few things that I have done and learnt.
I have been a keen user of Drupal 7 since it first appeared, and before that Drupal 6, but have never made contributions to the project. I had been looking forward to Drupal 8 though with some trepidation because of the major technology changes and increasing complication, brought home to me when trying alpha then beta versions. I guess I would have persevered but for my discovery of Backdrop. In recent weeks I have become very enthusiastic about Backdrop; its aims correspond to my needs for something for small and medium websites, with significant improvements over Drupal 7. Thank you Jen and Nate and others for this great initiative - I am resolved to help.
One of my most satisfying achievements in recent weeks is the porting of the CKEditor module from Drupal 7 to Backdrop, and here I am just now using it in earnest! I have had some puzzling moments but, putting a question on the official CKEditor help page who should reply but none other than Wiktor Walc, maintainer of the Drupal module, and very soon he identified the problem and provided the solution. Then another problem was reported and Nate stepped in with the answer. Thank you guys, your teamwork is first-rate.
I have also produced ports of the OAuth and Twitter modules, my aim being to get to a happy situation where adding a post or page to a Backdrop site will automatically generate a tweet on Twitter. This is something I have in use on a Drupal 7 site by using these modules together with Rules. So my next target is to achieve a port of Rules but I see that this module makes extensive use of entities provided by the Drupal Entities API module. So now I must learn about entities, what they are in Drupal 7 and what the changes are for Backdrop. How can I possibly get my head around all this? Watch this space.