Drupal 8 Case Studies: Sharing the Know How of 3 different migration projects

If you want to understand how other people move to Drupal 8, for sure this is a session you'll want to watch! During the first year of the Core 8 release, Evolving Web has been working on multiple "moving to D8" projects all across North America.

What will I present

On this session, I will present how we ran 3 sample different migration projects to Drupal 8 during 2016:

• Evolving Web (our own company website) - Redesign, multilingual support, migration and relaunch on D8.
• Council of Responsible Nutrition - Redesign, client content entry during dev phase and relaunch on D8.
• CARTaGENE - Redesign, multilingual support, migration and relaunch on D8.

But why talk about 3 migrations? Isn't 1 enough?

There is no one single path for running a migration. It depends on the type of clients, their needs, their reasons to be involved during the dev phase, the end product... and the list can extend as much as we want.

These specific projects were taken from all the ones we delivered as "sample ones" for demonstrating the different approaches we had to use to achieve the same final objective: moving to Drupal 8. Here I'll talk about what we learned on each one, what we had to build and what remains in our records as an effective approach.

I'll use a lot of tables on the slides to focus on the differences among the 3 solutions, and I will explain why each one was addressed that way.

What you'll want to know for sure

And for this part of the description of the session, instead of a summary of topics, I'll just use a list of questions you'll feel better with. I will answer and explain in details the following:

• How to envision a Drupal 8 migration way ahead? 
• How to manage estimates?
• What modules we used and alternatives?
• How to smoothly move Content, User Accounts, Taxonomy...?
• How do we handle the redesign & the new theme? 
• How to manage the workflow of the development team using Git and Configuration Management?
• How to allow your clients to continue working on the old site to the minute before launch?
• What alternatives did we use for content management during dev?
• How to manage Demos, client onboarding & the overall process?
• and more...

...plus the ones that come up from the attendees at the end of the presentation and I know what to answer ;)

Development Workflow: The pivot point.

Yes, for sure this is a core point among the 3 projects that was the "win-win" from the very beginning.

• Docker + Drupal 8 + Configuration Management + Drush = SECRET FORMULA

Those 4 factors were crucial for managing the DEV workflow and the common formula among each different approach. I will dedicate some time to talk about this and how we used it for content staging, demos, deploying, testing...

A session you don't want to miss

Well, it is all said. I'll be more than happy to share all our experience during this process and I'll be waiting for you at the session. Thanks!