Migrating a website software version is one of the most complicated 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 basic info : Which modules to use? There are a lot of modules, lots of them doing similar or related things. You want to try not to have too many modules, because they each slow things down a little bit, and because you’ll have to maintain them (by installing updates as they are issued). http://drupalmodules.com has reviews. To help you assess the health and life expectancy of a module, look, on the module’s project page, to see how many people are using it (at the bottom of the page). Look at the top right to see how recently people have been committing to maintaining it.
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. After clicking Continue, you will be brought to the screen in the following screenshot. Enter all the required details such as your existing website’s credentials, the database location and the location of your website files.
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.
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.
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. Blocks and contexts. Many distributions use the Context module to position blocks. Your existing site may use the core Block module for this purpose, may use Context or some other tool, or may use a combination of tools for block placement. With your new distribution’s blocks displaying as well as those enabled by your existing site, you may get more than you need or want. To address this issue, selectively disable blocks left over from your existing site. If they were custom blocks, you may wish to delete them. See more details about Upgrading from Drupal 7.