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D7 to D8 Migration

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Summary

Ivan Stegic and Tess Flynn discuss migrating Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 8.

Guests

Tess Flynn, TEN7 DevOps, and Ivan Stegic, TEN7 Founder and President

Transcript

Tess: You're listening to the TEN7.com audiocast. We're here to discuss Drupal, migration, technology, and I'm here with -

Ivan: Ivan Stegic

Tess: And

Jonathan: Jonathan Freed

Tess: And I'm Tess Flynn otherwise known as Socketwench and... so, we have some questions to go through today, Jonathan. Why don't you get us started?

Jonathan: Thank you very much, Tess. Let's see, our first question: why are we launching this informational program of an audiocast?

Ivan: Well, we're doing it because we don't want to do a podcast and have audio out there the web and in the iTunes store that lingers and never gets repeated so we're going to try this, we're going to experiment with short audiocasts because we know our listeners' attention span is very short. And we're going to hopefully put them up and transcribe them, and have them as enhancements to our blog posts.

Jonathan: For our second question, what are the key feature differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8?

Tess: Where do we start with this one? Because there are so many of them. There's a lot of backend changes, there's a lot of technology changes. Some have compared Drupal 8 to removing an entire house from the foundation and then putting it down on a new foundation. And that's not necessarily inaccurate. That's a pretty good description. We went through a huge amount of effort to rework Drupal 8 to be based on newer technologies such as PHP 7 so it's faster and more memory efficient; with Composer so that we can bring in more efforts from the external -- outside Drupal PHP community, with twig for better theming -- the list goes on and on and on.

Ivan: And just some user interface changes in the upgrade between D7 and D8. We added in place editing, which never happened before, so you can now change content on the page that you're on just by -- just when you're looking at it. We designed a theme so that it is mobile first. We also designed and implemented multilingual first, as well. There's internationalization: that's a part of core. Accessibility has been improved, and was a core initiative. And actually, I've read that there are fewer modules now involved in Drupal 8 compared to the original core of Drupal 7. So, fewer modules, bigger punch, and we've brought in additional functionality from contrib as well.

Jonathan: And the last question: what are the factors that a website owner should consider when trying to decide if they really need to do a Drupal 8 upgrade?

Ivan: In my mind, the biggest factor is how old your current site is, and what technology it's currently based on. If you have a Drupal 6 site, you are more at risk from a security standpoint than you are in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, mostly because Drupal 6 is no longer supported. So, if you're in Drupal 6 you should absolutely be considering an upgrade to Drupal 8. And then, depending on how old your Drupal 7 site is, if it's anything less than a year or a year-and-a-half old -- so if it was built at any point starting in 2016 -- you probably don't have a good case to upgrade to Drupal 8. But, anything older than 2016, there's a definitely a reason to be considering Drupal 8 and an upgrade to Drupal 8, especially if you feel like there is a user-experience issue with your current site.

Jonathan: Thanks, Ivan! And Tess, do you have anything to add to that?

Tess: No! I think Ivan covered that really, really well.

Ivan: Thank you.

Jonathan: Excellent! Well that brings us to the end of our first audiocast and I would like to thank Tess and Ivan for sharing their insights today. Please visit us at TEN7.com and keep an eye out on the TEN7 blog for future audiocasts. This is Jonathan Freed and thank you for listening!

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