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Upgrading a website software version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Migrating to Drupal 8? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : How to log into your site in maintenance mode. If you put your site into maintenance mode (using the configuration page of the admin section of your site), it will not be accessible to internet users who are not logged into the site. This is handy to keep it hidden while you’re still developing it. If you go ahead and log out of the site, however, it will not be accessible to you either. Ooops! The solution is to go to www.nameofyoursite.com/user/login. Then you can log back in.

First of all, make a list of all the contributed modules on your current website. Next, check whether these modules have a Drupal 8 compatible version. In case of unavailability of the Drupal 8 version, the migration process will suffer. Fortunately, Drupal 8 has come a long way and many of the major modules now do support Drupal 8. You can check all the available update paths through the Migrate UI modules. 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 importing data from a non-Drupal datastore, start with Set up Migrate Demo Site and Source Data . We’ll walk through the process of connecting the migrate system to an external data source, writing custom migration paths, using custom process plugins to transform data during import, and best practices for executing your custom migrations. We’ll primarily look at using an external MySQL database as our data source, but the techniques learned will apply to any data source. We’ll also discuss how to extract data from CSV, JSON, and XML sources.

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.

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.

You must first understand how your current site is built, and this starts with taking an accurate inventory of the Drupal modules you are currently using. This information is pretty easy to find (Administer > Site building > Modules, or go to the Available Updates page at admin/reports/updates), and this type of preparation will come in handy a bit later in your upgrade process. Will I still need this particular module in Drupal 8? Your Drupal developers are best positioned to answer this question, and they’ll certainly need some knowledge of Drupal 8 core modules ahead of time before giving a definitive “yes” or “no.” See extra details at Drupal 8 Upgrade.