First steps: migrating to Drupal 8
Migrating a website software version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Upgrading from Drupal 7? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : What the heck is this Drupal thing anyway? OK, so my best understanding of this is that it’s a little software package. It’s written in a language called PHP. It’s made up of core modules which you can download from http://drupal.org/project/drupal, and a bunch of optional (or “contributed”) modules, which you can surf at http://drupal.org/project/modules. All of this then sits around in a little set of folders.
First of all, make a list of all the contributed modules on your current website. Next, check whether these modules have a Drupal 8 compatible version. In case of unavailability of the Drupal 8 version, the migration process will suffer. Fortunately, Drupal 8 has come a long way and many of the major modules now do support Drupal 8. You can check all the available update paths through the Migrate UI modules. After proceeding, you will be brought to the Migrate UI where you can check all the potential issues and errors that you might encounter as well as all the available and the missing paths. Go through this screen and when satisfied, start the migration.
If you’re migrating from a previous version of Drupal, start with our Preparing for a Drupal-to-Drupal Migration tutorial. From there you’ll learn how to perform a basic update using either the built in UI or the contributed Drush commands, as well as some common best practices to help things go as smoothly as possible. If you’re looking to customize your Drupal-to-Drupal migration a bit, continue through the tutorials on writing custom migrations, and then we’ll go in-depth on how to use those skills to tailor the Drupal-to-Drupal update process to your specific use-case.
The steps above outline how to get a distribution minimally installed on an existing site. But you’ll still have a lot of work to do to reconcile your existing site content and structure with what has been created by the distribution. Here are a few tips to get you started–but you should begin with the assumption that there will be lots more you’ll discover and need to fix. Blocks and contexts. Many distributions use the Context module to position blocks. Your existing site may use the core Block module for this purpose, may use Context or some other tool, or may use a combination of tools for block placement. With your new distribution’s blocks displaying as well as those enabled by your existing site, you may get more than you need or want. To address this issue, selectively disable blocks left over from your existing site. If they were custom blocks, you may wish to delete them.
Drupal distributions are usually used as a starting point for developing a new website. The most straightforward way to use a distribution is to install it from scratch. From there, you can selectively migrate in content from other sources, including one or more existing websites. Migrating data here might be as simple as copying and pasting several pages from an old site into the new site. For larger sites, it could involve writing custom migration scripts or using an existing Drupal module like Migrate or Feeds.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, Drupal 8 is much different than previous versions of the CMS, hence all of these upgrade implications. That’s because the Drupal community decided that the platform needed much better core standards and functionalities. Thus, Drupal 8 is essentially a rebuilt version of Drupal with the entire system moved to symfony php, a framework that any versions in the foreseeable future will also be built on. So even though upgrading to Drupal 8 from Drupal 7 might be a painstaking process, updating to Drupal 9 and beyond should be a breeze – that is, once you are already on 8. See extra info on Drupal 7 Migration.
