Drupal custom development and hosting
Does your Drupal website need an upgrade? You may want to consider upgrading your existing Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8. This article will explain the process, and details for such a website migration, and why you may want to do so.
Drupal 8 has now been released and running since 2016. Staying safe can be an ongoing battle when running a website. Although Drupal is one of the safest CMS platforms, it is still recommended to keep up to date with the latest versions. While those working on it are focused on improving the current Drupal 8, Drupal 7 will eventually stop receiving updates. Upgrading to the current version of Drupal is not the most simple process, but luckily there are development agencies that can help make this process much easier.
Note: This article explains the migration process for simple Drupal websites. For those that have any custom code, or other customizations made to the site, it is recommended to seek professional help.
There are 2 methods of migrating the site, you can use Migrate UI or Drush. For this article, we are going to be using the Migrate UI. First, you can compile a checklist before the upgrade.
Checklist
Before you start with the migration, it is a good idea to go through the following checklist:
Below are the Required Migration Modules
Drupal 8 core comes bundled with these migration modules:
- Migrate: This is the core upgrade API module.
- Migrate Drupal: This module has all the classes that are required for migration/upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.
- Migrate Upgrade: This module provides the user with a simple UI for the migration of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.
Note: You could potentially run into the following problems when migrating the site.
- Missing the migration paths.
- Contributed modules may not migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 properly.
First, you need to make sure that all of the modules on your website are going to be compatible with Drupal 8. There may be the odd instance where your current module does not have a compatible Drupal 8 version, which you may need to discuss with your developers to work around. Once these checks are complete, you can start the actual process of the migration.
Step 1. Save a copy your original website
This is a safety precaution in case there is any missing information or the migration, or process does not go as planned. You can sign in to your host, download and save the files whichever method works best for you. As long as you have access to all of the files the way they were when your site was last running.
Step 2. Download the latest Drupal 8 version
You can download the latest version of Drupal by going to the following link.
Step 3. Provision a local Drupal 8 site
After the download, you can set up the new Drupal 8 site on your local machine. For those that are inexperienced when it comes to setting up a local Drupal site, you can read the following article.
Step 4. Make sure you have the migrate upgrade module
Go to your new Drupal 8 website on your local machine, and go to the extend tab in the administrator dashboard. Verify the three main migrate modules are there:
- Migrate
- Migrate Drupal
- Migrate Upgrade
Step 5. Enable the modules
Check and enable the modules, and click on the install button at the bottom of the page.
Step 6. Navigate to the upgrade path
Once the modules are installed, you can go to the upgrade path by adding a /upgrade to the end of your webstie URL. Once landing on the path, follow the directions on the page and click continue.
Step 7. Add the details
After clicking on continue, you will be brought to a form. Enter the details of our original site in the fields as shown on the page.
Step 8. Commence the migration
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.
As you can see, it is not entirely difficult migrating the site. It can, however, be a difficult process for those who are inexperienced or do not have any technical skills. This is why it is recommended to use a reputable development agency that has past experience with migrating such a website. Devradius provides those website owners and administrators with access to experienced developers to help with migrating websites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.