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Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

drupal 8 logo featured alongside drupal logos showing the growth of Drupal

Now that Drupal 8 has gained some momentum, it is time to start planning out your upgrade strategy. You want to upgrade to get the latest benefits and take advantage of the future stability that comes with the direction that Drupal will be taking from here on out. Before upgrading you will want to consider some things about what your current site has. In this article we will be covering some of those questions with some context to assist in the decision making process. Let’s determine if you website is adequately serving the current needs of your business and which content will need to be brought over to the new Drupal 8 site. There may be a difficulty in the switch, but being prepared will put you in position to handle whatever comes up.

So, you have a nice Drupal 7 site that's been running happily for years, and maybe you're thinking it's time to upgrade – or, if you haven't given it much thought yet, there's certainly plenty of reasons to do so now. But, Drupal 8 is a pretty big step forward from Drupal 7. What exactly is an upgrade going to entail? What do you need to consider before you do so? We've upgraded numerous sites now, and today I'd like to go over a few things that I think are important to know before starting on such a project.

Before You Start

Just because you've decided to upgrade, doesn't mean that you can do it right away and be done with it by dinner. Unfortunately, there isn't any one-click solution to take your site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 (although future upgrades should be closer to reaching that level of simplicity). Here are a few things to consider before you touch the first line of code or content:

Do you still want the same site? Doing a large upgrade such as this is an excellent time to re-evaluate your site's functionality and appearance. Now that you've had it for some time, is there anything you want to change? Any new features you want to add that maybe weren't feasible before because of how the old site was built? Although upgrading can be done in such a way that everything stays almost exactly the same for your site's visitors, it's good to at least consider what potential improvements you could make, perhaps by leveraging some of Drupal 8's great new features. Maybe your site just needs a facelift, or has some long-standing bugs you want to fix, or you want to take advantage of new CSS or JavaScript technologies which weren't available when you first built the site. Upgrading is the perfect time to take a fresh look at things.

How are you migrating? One critical part of most upgrades is to migrate content and user information from the old site to the new one. Databases for Drupal 8 are structured differently than they were in Drupal 7, which means that to upgrade the site you can't just swap out the code while keeping the same database… you have to actually move the content into a new database as well and adjust it to fit Drupal 8's slightly different structure. This is a pretty big departure from how Drupal upgrades worked in the past.

There are two main ways to do this migration. Drupal 8 includes a Migrate API, which is perfect for some simple sites. However, not all contributed modules have the plugins necessary to migrate their data in this way, and any data you might be storing in some customized way certainly doesn't. Although it is possible to write your own plugins, in our experience it's easier to take a different approach by writing an entirely custom migration. This does however require having some more familiarity with Drupal coding than the Migrate API route does. Generally, what a custom migration involves is writing a script and appropriate queries to first retrieve your information from the old database, and then to write it to the new Drupal 8 database in the appropriate format.

Do you know enough Drupal 8? If your site is mostly built using core and contributed modules and themes, you'll probably be good to go. Drupal 8's admin UI does have some changes from Drupal 7's, but none of them are very difficult to get used to and most introduce new ways to navigate and improve your site. However, if your site uses much in the way of custom modules or if it has a custom theme, then before upgrading you should make sure your developers and themers are familiar with Drupal 8, perhaps by working on some other simple Drupal 8 project first or by getting some training on the changes, either in-person or through an online course. The changes in how you code custom modules and themes in Drupal 8 are significant, so they may take some getting used to, but ultimately they are the foundation of what makes Drupal 8 leaps and bounds better than its predecessor. Knowing how to use them effectively is key to having a Drupal 8 site that continues to be maintainable for years to come.

Still Not Sure You're Ready to Upgrade?  Learn more about the benefits and our upgrade process. 

What to Expect

Alright, so you've gotten everything figured out. All that's left to do now is to, well, actually upgrade the site. Here are a couple of things you should plan for when starting most any upgrade.

Expect to have a few difficulties: Even if the upgrade seems like it will be a simple one, you should go into it expecting to have a few unexpected challenges come up, because they almost certainly will. Maybe it's one particular type of field that doesn't have the same settings in 8 as it does in 7. Maybe it's a combination of contrib modules which used to work together one way and don't anymore (one example: The Context module can no longer be used in conjunction with Metatags to set metadata in contextual circumstances). Maybe it's that your site uses a lot of different webforms, and although the submission data can get migrated without too much trouble, recreating the forms themselves can't be done automatically. 

Regardless of what it ends up being, plan to have some unexpected difficulties during the upgrade. In my experience, these challenges tend to be fairly easy to fix or work around through some combination of contributed modules and custom code, so although they can add some complexity to the upgrade it's rare to find a dealbreaker so late in the process.

Expect to have two sites for a little while: Your new Drupal 8 site is completely separate from your old Drupal 7 site, and that means that it needs to be installed somewhere other than where your old site is, and it probably has to have its own domain so you can access it during the upgrade process. You'll be able to keep your old domain though - once the upgrade is done and your Drupal 8 site is ready to go, all you should have to do is change your main domain's settings to point to the new website rather than the old one.

When you first start the upgrade, your Drupal 8 site is likely to be almost empty. If you have lots of custom modules to recreate or anything and the migration itself isn't done yet, then maybe it has some placeholder content to start with. Then, once the migration is done, all the relevant content from the old site gets migrated into the new one. At this point, your content and user information is being stored in both sites. It also means that, from now until the new version of the site launches, any changes you make to the content of the old site won't be automatically reflected in the new site and will be lost when you deploy the upgrade. For many sites, this problem can be mitigated by having a period of time in which changes get made to both sites, instead of just to one of them.

Still, it isn't ideal to have to enter new content twice for an extended period of time, so to solve this, one thing we like to do is to actually have two migrations. The first migration happens early on in the development of the Drupal 8 site, and we use the content from that migration while finishing most of the upgrade. Then, shortly before the upgrade goes live, we do a "final migration" to get any changes which have been made on the Drupal 7 site since the original migration. If all goes well, this results in only a day or two (or zero!) during which changes have to be made in both sites.

Once the upgrade is finished and your domain name settings adjusted so that the new site is live, it's worthwhile to do one last check of the old site to see if there are any recent changes or user registrations that may have been missed. Depending on how your migration script works, these could be migrated again with that, or they could be replicated manually. Once that's done though, huzzah! Your newly upgraded Drupal 8 site is finally ready for the world to see.

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