Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 - A brief guide.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider Drupal 8 migration:

• You get most of the functionalities out-of-the-box which means you don’t need to install and use additional contributed Drupal modules to take care of some major important tasks.
• Responsiveness is also out-of-the-box – So you don’t have to worry about how your Drupal website will look like on different devices.
• Content authors will love it as Drupal 8 provides a more organized, clean and user-friendly interface to manage content.
• A lot of documentation is available to help developers in having a better and more knowledgeable experience.
• Drupal 8 theming is powered with ‘Twig’, which is a PHP-based template engine. It is less complex than PHP template and also provides a more secure theming layer.
• ...and there are a lot more.

So, How complex is Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 Migration?

Well, that depends on the complexity of your website. The more stuff you have on your drupal website, the more problems you are likely to run into. By “stuff”, I mean modules – both drupal custom modules and Contributed modules, content types, vocabularies, etc. Many modules from Drupal 7 have been replaced by new modules in Drupal 8 and some inactive drupal 7 modules that have no support or are obsolete, are going to be unavailable. For such modules, you might need to do some manual upgrading.

Methods of Drupal Migration

Drupal 8 not only makes website building more powerful and easy, it also makes migration simple and quick. With Drupal 8 core, comes three modules that can help you migrate from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8 easily. You will first need to create a fresh new website on Drupal 8 and enable the core drupal migration modules. Using the browser user-interface you can now start the drupal 8 migration process. That’s it! Once done, you can review migration messages and make changes as required. You might notice some errors messages at this stage. Let’s say, if you have some modules that also need to be migrated to Drupal 8, unless you enable and configure them in your Drupal 8 site, it will not get migrated and you may run into ‘Missing path’ errors. If you have a large database and a highly complex Drupal website to be migrated, using some contributed drupal modules that use Drush commands are recommended. Let us look at some migration modules:

Core Drupal 8 Modules:

Migrate – This module provides the framework for content drupal 8 migration.
Migrate Drupal – This module provides classes and functions to migrate content and configuration to Drupal 8.
Migrate Drupal UI – This module provides a user-interface and tools that are needed to perform an upgrade to Drupal 8.

Contributed Drupal Modules:

Migrate Upgrade – Provides Drush support for migrating or upgrading to Drupal 8.
Migrate Tools – Provides tools to manage Drupal migrations, like listing migrations and statuses, performing imports, performing rollbacks, stopping an operation, etc.
Migrate UI – Provides a user interface for editing and configuring migrations to Drupal 8.
Drupal Module Upgrader – Provides Drush scripts for converting module code from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.