Updating a website software version is one of the highest risk procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : How to see the NID of a node. If the node is in ‘edit’ mode, you can see the nid in the URL. (A node, in case you’re wondering, is a page like an article or a forum posting. You can design what fields it has and how they is displayed. Typically a node will consist of a heading, some body text, maybe an image, etc. Drupal assigns two URL addresses to each node, a human-friendly one made of words, and a nid, or node id.)
Drupal 8 turned one in the November of 2016. It is about time that the Drupal 7 website owners and administrators should start considering upgrading the websites to Drupal 8. With the Drupal team focused on improving Drupal 8, it is inevitable that Drupal 7 will stop getting official updates in the near future. The great thing about upgrading to Drupal 8 is the remarkably easy process as a result of the inclusion of a few great migration modules in its core. 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.
Upgrading is the process of moving your site from a previous major version of Drupal to a newer version, for example from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. This consists of upgrading the codebase to the appropriate version and then migrating the data from your old site into the new one. Drupal 8 core contains two modules to help facilitate this process: Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI.
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. Most distributions are built using the Features module, which allows exporting configuration from a Drupal site – content types, fields, views, and so on – into code, so that it can be enabled on multiple sites. For components like content types and fields to be exportable, they need to have a “machine name”–a unique name that will be the same on every site they’re enabled on. For example, a date-type field used to store the date of an event might have the machine name field_date.
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.
There are several tips and best practices to follow to help you prepare for the upgrade. Still, since this is such a complex process, we highly recommend getting members of your development team involved from the beginning, which will help ensure the upgrade goes as smoothly as possible. Upgrading to Drupal 8 is more similar to building a new website than previous Drupal updates were, meaning that you should never perform the upgrade to Drupal 8 on a live site. It’s also strongly recommended that you create a backup of your live site so that if anything goes awry, you can quickly roll the site back to an earlier version while you figure out what the issue is. Read more info about Drupal 8 Migration.