Upgrading a website software version is one of the highest risk procedure 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.
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.
Update your site to the latest version of Drupal 6 (core and contributed modules). Before upgrading to Drupal 7, disable and uninstall modules you know you won’t be using in the new site. To help determine which modules to uninstall, you could review the list of modules included in the distribution, which often are found in the download in the directory profiles/[distribution_name]/modules. If a given module is not in the distribution and you don’t foresee needing its functionality on your new site, you may choose to uninstall it.
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 details on Drupal 7 Upgrade.