Upgrade to Drupal 8

Drupal 8 includes the powerful migrate framework that allows us to migrate content from various kinds of data sources into Drupal. In fact, Drupal has replaced the entire core update with the migrate framework, allowing us to upgrade to Drupal 8 from Drupal 6 or 7 directly.

Like any method, there are benefits and disadvantages here. Some of the benefits apart from possibility of direct upgrade from Drupal 6 is that you are sure that your data is clean and directly matches the new architecture. It also allows you to start your site from scratch and rethink your content structure. The disadvantages here are manageable as well. Currently, with migrate in beta, there is no easy way to upgrade Drupal. With contrib still catching up with migrate API, many modules are missing the migration support required for a direct upgrade.

In this session, you will learn how to manage these issues and take full control over your migration as the site is upgraded. You will learn:

• How to setup your site for migration.
• How to start a migration and what do you need.
• How to change field types even during an upgrade (like changing a text field to telephone field).
• How to selectively run the migrations for full control over the process.

We will migrate an example site to a new Drupal 8 site complete with config management and composer setup. Composer knowledge is preferred but not required.