Upgrading a website software version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. How to do a Drupal 8 upgrade? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general 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. 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.
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. Most distributions are built using the Features module, which allows exporting configuration from a Drupal site – content types, fields, views, and so on – into code, so that it can be enabled on multiple sites. For components like content types and fields to be exportable, they need to have a “machine name”–a unique name that will be the same on every site they’re enabled on. For example, a date-type field used to store the date of an event might have the machine name field_date.
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.
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 details about Drupal 8 Upgrade.