Steps to Upgrade Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
Since the release of Drupal 8, there is bustle everywhere debating whether it is advisable to upgrade to this version. Jumping into statistics, we come to know that the first four months of Drupal saw 30,000 sites coming up. It further extended to a total of 60,000 sites in the first six months.
People are uncertain about how the new update would be! But from an eagle’s view, owing to the commendable features in the new version, obviously the entire crowd will soon switch over to the latest upgrade very soon.
Drupal 7 to 8 Migration Module
As expected, the migration process to Drupal 8 has been made as smooth as possible. It is made compatible with Symphony and its components but it comes with the added disadvantage of high maintenance cost, as a price for the custom code. But one unavoidable consequence is the new Twig-based template engine which will automatically re-design the whole site and its appearance.
It is highly advisable to break the content to manageable small parts after properly reviewing them. The best practice is to prune the unnecessary content so that the additional burden of migrating them is avoided. The quality of the data should also be assessed before migration and if required they can be further enhanced by directing them to content writers.
Once you are all set for migration, you have to create a migrate manifest YAML file using which you can trigger the further migrations to happen. Due to the vast size of the content involved, batch failure is prone to happen. But it can be overcome by re-running it from the web!
Tools involved for Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 Content Migration
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The Drupal 8 Contrib Porting Tracker is a Kanban board used to check the upgrade status of a module, also used to provide information about projects for the community. It saves time and helps us in having a track of the modules and their porting status.
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A module called Upgrade status helps us in being aware of the upgrade status of all the individual modules. If you are running multiple sites, then it is essential to install Upgrade Status in each site for generating status reports.
The main reason why most of the customers haven’t switched to the Drupal 8 is that they are unaware of the latest updates and because they are hoping for the contributed modules to become available.
If you have decided to upgrade your Drupal site, then make sure to update your custom modules, data migration, and other necessary features. Create a detailed plan for your migration and make use of the best tools to switch to Drupal 8. Hire expert Drupal web developers for custom Drupal development from India to migrate your website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.