Jim's Articles

Introduction to upgrading to Drupal 8

Migrating a website software version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Drupal 8 Upgrade? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : Where does my Drupal installation live? Well, if your first step has been to download Drupal to your computer, it won’t be able to work there. It likes to live on a server, not on your computer at home. In the future, when you’ve developed your new site a bit, you’ll want to put it on the internet, and your Drupal installation will sit on your server in a little folder. That’s where it’s happiest. In the beginning though, if you’re going to build your site on your computer at home, you’ll need to download a pretend server environment, like Dev Desktop from Acquia, http://www.acquia.com/downloads, that will let you run Drupal on your computer.

The very first thing you should do is to make a local version of the website. This is an essential step because making changes to a live website is very risky and is never a recommended practice. This way, if anything does go awry, your actual website will remain safe and functional. When done with the installation of the modules, you will have to navigate to the upgrade path. For this, go to www.yoursite.com/upgrade (remember to replace yoursite with the name of your Drupal 8 website). You will be brought to the following screen. Please make sure you follow the directions on the screen before proceeding.

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.

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.

Update your site to the latest version of Drupal 6 (core and contributed modules). Before upgrading to Drupal 7, disable and uninstall modules you know you won’t be using in the new site. To help determine which modules to uninstall, you could review the list of modules included in the distribution, which often are found in the download in the directory profiles/[distribution_name]/modules. If a given module is not in the distribution and you don’t foresee needing its functionality on your new site, you may choose to uninstall it.

Though it’s been over three years since Drupal 8 launched, many companies using Drupal to power their digital experiences have yet to upgrade Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 due to the complexities involved. Many Drupal agencies and general Drupal users have found out the hard way that making the jump from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is actually more like a re-build instead of an upgrade. Meanwhile, Drupal continues to release updates to the Drupal 8 core framework, and Drupal 9 is on the horizon for release in mid-2020. As such, the longer these companies put off the Drupal 8 upgrade, the more difficult that eventual upgrade will be when they’re forced to make it. Read extra details about https://www.95visual.com/blog/migrating-from-drupal-7-to-drupal-8-and-beyond.