Marie Poppins June 18, 2019

Upgrading a website software version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Migrating to Drupal 8? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : You can type content straight into a block. Now, maybe you’ll find this dead obvious, but I’d been working for several months with Drupal before I realized that. As well as creating blocks with Drupal, you can also click ‘add block’ on the blocks page, and just type whatever text you like into your new block.

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. Though not yet perfect, the upgrade procedure in Drupal has come quite a long way. As you can see in this tutorial, the upgrade process is now very streamlined and is an integral part of the Drupal Core. If you liked this blog post, then give a read to another blog post by us on, How To Update Drupal 8 Core.

The upgrade process, and underlying Migration API, are still evolving. We don’t anticipate them changing dramatically even though they are still marked experimental. Beware of any resources that were written before Drupal 8.1.x was released (April 19, 2016) as the system changed considerably in ways that invalidate many of the older articles.

Drupal distributions are usually used as a starting point for developing a new website. The most straightforward way to use a distribution is to install it from scratch. From there, you can selectively migrate in content from other sources, including one or more existing websites. Migrating data here might be as simple as copying and pasting several pages from an old site into the new site. For larger sites, it could involve writing custom migration scripts or using an existing Drupal module like Migrate or Feeds.

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. Content types and fields. You may have existing content types on your site that overlap with those provided by the distribution. For example, if you have an existing content type called ‘news’, it might have a function very close to that of an ‘article’ content provided by one of the features you’ve enabled. To begin to use the new feature’s functionality, you could consider converting the existing ‘news’ content into ‘article’ content. See extra details on Drupal 8 Upgrade.