Migrate to Drupal

Drupal allows building highly complex content structures ranging from simple blogs to online stores to advanced enterprise publishing with complex content approval workflows. Migrating content into such complex structures is a complex problem for which Drupal provides a simple framework in the form of the migrate module. The 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 Drupal migration system for migrating all sorts of content to Drupal (and that includes migrating/upgrading from older versions of Drupal as well). Drupal 8 and 9 use the same migration system to update from Drupal 6 or 7. Given the Drupal 7 EOL approaching soon and Drupal 9 release, it is imperative that developers understand how to write migrations. In this session, you will learn:

- Understand 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 the 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 the internals of migration and writing better migrations. You will explore key tools which simplify the experience when writing and managing migrations. You will walk away ready to:

- Understand migrations in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8/9
- Communicate migration in detail to project stakeholders
- Write efficient migrations
- Run the migrations efficiently

*Session Materials*