Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

Migrating a website script version is one of the most complicated task a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Drupal 8 upgrade guide? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : What the heck is this Drupal thing anyway? OK, so my best understanding of this is that it’s a little software package. It’s written in a language called PHP. It’s made up of core modules which you can download from http://drupal.org/project/drupal, and a bunch of optional (or “contributed”) modules, which you can surf at http://drupal.org/project/modules. All of this then sits around in a little set of folders.

When you are done with setting up a local Drupal 8 website, navigate to the Extend tab of the new website and verify that the three main migrate modules (Migrate, Migrate Drupal and Migrate Upgrade) are present in the Core (experimental) section. 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.

The upgrade process, and underlying Migration API, are still evolving. We don’t anticipate them changing dramatically even though they are still marked experimental. Beware of any resources that were written before Drupal 8.1.x was released (April 19, 2016) as the system changed considerably in ways that invalidate many of the older articles.

Here are basic steps to take to upgrade an existing Drupal site to use a distribution. These are rough guidelines only. Because each site and each distribution is configured differently, you’re likely to run into additional complexities. But these notes should at least get you started in the right direction. Select a distribution to use. You’ll want to find the distribution that most closely matches your site requirements. See the listings and comparisons of Drupal distributions on drupal.org.

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. Content types and fields. You may have existing content types on your site that overlap with those provided by the distribution. For example, if you have an existing content type called ‘news’, it might have a function very close to that of an ‘article’ content provided by one of the features you’ve enabled. To begin to use the new feature’s functionality, you could consider converting the existing ‘news’ content into ‘article’ content. See more info about Upgrading from Drupal 7.