Nickel City Creative Drupal 7 solutions, now available for Backdrop CMS

By on

Nickel City Creative is happy to announce support for Backdrop CMS. NCC's Drupal 7 Extended Support solutions, including CKEditor 5, CKEditor 5 Media Management and Linking and CKEditor 5 Plugin Pack are now available for Backdrop. Current clients who have purchased one or more Drupal 7 products will receive the equivalent Backdrop CMS product(s) free of charge.

Backdrop CMS

Embedding a YouTube video into a textarea using CKEditor 5 and Entity Embed.
Embedding a YouTube video using Entity Embed

Backdrop is similar to Drupal 7, having started its life as a fork of the CMS in 2013. While Drupal 7 reached its end-of-life in January of 2025, Backdrop CMS continues to be actively developed. For existing Drupal 7 site owners, migrating to Backdrop CMS is the most straightforward way to continue to receive security coverage and stay up-to-date.

Backdrop CMS includes many of the most popular features from Drupal 7 contrib and Drupal 8+ core out of the box, such as Views, HTML 5 form elements and configuration management. It also includes a compatibility layer to help with porting existing D7 projects.

What Nickel City Creative Brings to Backdrop

Selecting a file using the media library modal dialog.
Selecting a file using the media library

Nickel City Creative offers a variety of Drupal 7 Extended Support (D7ES) solutions which add new capabilities to the CMS that were previously exclusive to Drupal 10+, such as support for modal dialogs and WYSIWYG editors. As Backdrop CMS also bundles many of these features, NCC's Backdrop solutions focus on enhancing and extending Backdrop's existing capabilities.

Some of the latest functionality from Drupal 10+ core and contrib, brought to Backdrop by NCC, include: an extensive CKEditor 5 plugin API, WYSIWYG entity embedding, an AJAX-powered media browser and support for rich content from remote providers (YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, etc.) via oEmbed.

Comparing NCC Solutions: Drupal 7 and Backdrop vs. Drupal 10+

While Nickel City Creative offers similar solutions for both Drupal 7 and Backdrop CMS, they vary slightly in implementation and capability. They can be compared against each other and Drupal 10+ core/contrib using the following table:

  NCC Drupal 7 NCC Backdrop Drupal 10+ Core/Contrib
CKEditor 5
  • Includes the Dialog, Editor, CKEditor 5 and CKEditor 5 Dev modules:
    • Dialog - Enables the creation of jQuery UI-based modal dialogs.
    • Editor - Introduces support for WYSIWYG editors.
    • CKEditor 5 - Adds support for the rich text editor.
    • CKEditor 5 Dev - Aids with developing extensions and modifications.
  • Includes the Dialog, Editor, Nickel CKEditor 5 and CKEditor 5 Dev modules:
    • Dialog - Enhances the core dialog API with multi-modal support, additional commands and an AJAX message API.
    • Editor - Enhances the core editor API, adding an AJAX-powered UI, dynamically generated HTML restrictions and improved language capabilities.
    • Nickel CKEditor 5 - Replaces the core CKEditor 5 module, providing an extensive plugin API that enhances the capabilities of existing plugins and simplifies the porting of plugins from Drupal 10+.
    • CKEditor 5 Dev - Aids with developing extensions and modifications.
  • Includes the Editor and CKEditor 5 modules.
  • Dialog functionality is part of core.
  • CKEditor 5 Dev is available as a contrib module.
CKEditor 5 Media and Linking
  • Includes the Entity Embed, Entity Embed Media, Linkit, Media, Media: oEmbed and Media Library modules:
    • Entity Embed - Embed entities, such as site content (pages/posts) or files (images/video) via CKEditor 5.
    • Entity Embed Media - Automatically converts files previously embedded with Media: WYSIWYG into embedded entities.
    • Linkit - Search for and link to existing site content.
    • Media - Integrates the media library with file and image fields.
    • Media Library - Quickly add, view and search through files using a dynamic AJAX-powered media browser.
    • Media oEmbed - Adds support for remote media from oEmbed providers such as YouTube, TikTok and Reddit.
  • Includes the Entity Embed, Entity Embed Media, Linkit, Media, Media: oEmbed and Media Library modules:
    • Entity Embed - Embed entities, such as site content (pages/posts) or files (images/video) via Nickel CKEditor 5.
    • Entity Embed Media - Automatically converts files previously embedded with Entity Embed for Drupal 7 and/or Media: WYSIWYG into embedded entities.
    • Linkit - Search for and link to existing site content.
    • Media - Integrates the media library with file and image fields.
    • Media Library - Quickly add, view and search through files using a dynamic AJAX-powered media browser.
    • Media oEmbed - Adds support for remote media from oEmbed providers such as YouTube, TikTok and Reddit.
  • Includes the Media and Media Library modules.
  • oEmbed functionality is part of Media.
  • Entity Embed and Linkit are available as contrib modules.
CKEditor 5 Plugin Pack
  • Includes the CKEditor 5 Plugin Pack module:
    • Bundles 19 CKEditor 5 plugins.
    • Supports custom HTML templates via the CTools plugin API.
  • Includes the CKEditor 5 Plugin Pack module:
    • Bundles 19 CKEditor 5 plugins.
    • Supports custom HTML templates via the Configuration API.

Compatibility and Platform Migration

Nickel City Creative's Drupal 7 and Backdrop CMS products are designed as drop-in replacements for their legacy Drupal 7 equivalents (Entity Embed, Linkit, Media, etc.). They also maximize cross-compatibility, making migrating between them as easy as possible. Products for both platforms attempt to maintain identical capabilities and data structures, with Drupal 7 database and CTools plugin storage mapping onto Backdrop config and hooks.

Additionally, extra attention has been paid to ensure that all products are as forward-compatible as possible, to allow for a potential migration to Drupal 10+.

Tags: