Migrate to Drupal

Drupal allows building highly complex content structures — ranging from simple blogs to online stores, from user content websites to advanced enterprise publishing with complex content approval workflows. What this means is that there’s no one way to migrate data from different systems to Drupal.

There’s no one way, but there is a simple framework. The migrate module allows data migration from various sources to Drupal in a structured approach — a way which can be controlled, monitored, and audited.

In this session, we’ll go over the module that’s widely used for migrating all sorts of content to Drupal (and that includes migrating from older versions of Drupal as well). Drupal 8 uses migrate in core to update from Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. With this development, it’s more important than ever for developers to understand how to write migrations. So we’ll cover:

• Understanding the migrate module and declarative programming
• Planning a migration and opportunity to restructure content and modify data
• Different parts of a migration
• Clear and complete mappings
• Reuse code across migration classes with inheritance and traits
• Continuous or incremental migration
• Migration performance
• Auditing migrations by stakeholders and verification
• Debugging migrations and common gotchas

Key Takeaways

We will look at these topics in context of both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 where migrate module has been moved into core. While the migrate module has changed in Drupal 8 in its architecture, much of the concepts remain the same. Understanding this architecture helps in understanding internals of migration and writing better migrations. We’ll explore key tools which simplify the experience when writing and managing migrations. The attendees will walk away ready to:

1. Understand migrations in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8
2. Communicate migration in detail to project stakeholders
3. Write efficient migrations
4. Run the migrations efficiently