5 07 19

Migrating a website software version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Drupal 8 Upgrade? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : Note that you don’t need to know anything about PHP to build a site in Drupal. When you search (preferably on Google) for a solution to your latest Drupal problem, a lot of the pages that come up will be providing snippets of PHP code. This is not the correct help information for you, the Drupal newbie. This is for technically competent people who are able to build their own modules and stuff like that. If you look at the other pages thrown up by your search, you will probably find an answer to your problem which involves working within the existing Drupal core and modules. That means, a solution you can implement using menus and tickboxes and whatnot, without needing to mess around with code.

The very first thing you should do is to make a local version of the website. This is an essential step because making changes to a live website is very risky and is never a recommended practice. This way, if anything does go awry, your actual website will remain safe and functional. 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 migrating from a previous version of Drupal, start with our Preparing for a Drupal-to-Drupal Migration tutorial. From there you’ll learn how to perform a basic update using either the built in UI or the contributed Drush commands, as well as some common best practices to help things go as smoothly as possible. If you’re looking to customize your Drupal-to-Drupal migration a bit, continue through the tutorials on writing custom migrations, and then we’ll go in-depth on how to use those skills to tailor the Drupal-to-Drupal update process to your specific use-case.

If you already have a Drupal website that has a considerable amount of content or a large number of users or has custom functionality you want to keep, though, you might want to try directly upgrading the site to use the distribution. Doing so could save you a lot of time in migrating content. But it will also raise a number of challenges. Upgrading to a distribution is probably something you should try only if you have the skills and time needed to do troubleshooting and some custom data work.

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. Roles. Many distributions will create one or more custom roles. Examples include contributor, editor, and administrator. If any of these roughly correspond to existing roles on your site, delete the roles created by the distribution and rename the existing ones to use the distribution role names. For example, if your site has a role called “site administrator” and the distribution has created a role called “administrator”, delete the newly created “administrator” role and rename “site administrator” to “administrator”. After adjusting the role names, visit admin/config/people/accounts, ensure the “administrator” role is selected as the “Administrator role”, and save the form. Consolidating the roles in this way will get you the functionality of the distribution’s roles and permissions while maintaining your existing users’ role allocations. See more info on Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.