Upgrading a website software version is one of the highest risk procedure a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : The content of your site does not live in your Drupal installation. It lives in a MySQL database which is managed by your Drupal installation. This database will sit somewhere on your server, as determined by your web host. (As an aside, I never did figure out where Dev Desktop puts the database on your computer at home. It’s a mystery.) Anyhow, the exception to this is that the images within your site do live in your Drupal installation, they are in the sites folder somewhere (depending on your settings), with Drupal keeping records of them in the database.
Drupal 8 turned one in the November of 2016. It is about time that the Drupal 7 website owners and administrators should start considering upgrading the websites to Drupal 8. With the Drupal team focused on improving Drupal 8, it is inevitable that Drupal 7 will stop getting official updates in the near future. The great thing about upgrading to Drupal 8 is the remarkably easy process as a result of the inclusion of a few great migration modules in its core. Though not yet perfect, the upgrade procedure in Drupal has come quite a long way. As you can see in this tutorial, the upgrade process is now very streamlined and is an integral part of the Drupal Core. If you liked this blog post, then give a read to another blog post by us on, How To Update Drupal 8 Core.
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 more info on Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.