Drupal 8 upgrade guide
Updating a website script version is one of the highest risk procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. How to do a Drupal 7 upgrade? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : Be careful where you put your optional modules and themes. Within the folders of your Drupal installation, there is a folder called ‘modules’ and one called ‘themes.’ These are NOT where you should put any contributed modules and themes that you add to your core installation. These folders are just for the core modules and themes. The folders you should use are a second set also called modules and themes, which sit within the ‘sites’ folder in your Drupal installation.
Note: Earlier, there used to be a migrate_plus module in Drupal 8 core which contained all the pieces of migrate functionality that wasn’t able to make it in the Drupal 7 core. It contained all the plugins for the support of XML, CSV and JSON data sources along with the support for databases like MS SQL or Oracle. This module has now been split into different modules, namely migrate_plus, migrate_tools and migrate_source_csv. After clicking Continue, you will be brought to the screen in the following screenshot. Enter all the required details such as your existing website’s credentials, the database location and the location of your website files.
Whether you’re updating from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7, or importing data from some other source, you need to know about the migrate system in Drupal 8. This guide provides a comprehensive look at the features of the Drupal 8 migrate API for both Drupal-to-Drupal updates, and migrating from any external datastore into Drupal.
Download the latest release of the distribution. Download and extract the latest release and copy your existing site’s Drupal 7 version settings.php file and files directory to the sites/default directory in the distribution install. This will point the new site to your existing site database.
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. See extra info about Drupal 7 Upgrade.
