How to: upgrading from Drupal 7
Migrating a website software version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Upgrading to Drupal 8? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : How to see the NID of a node. If the node is in ‘edit’ mode, you can see the nid in the URL. (A node, in case you’re wondering, is a page like an article or a forum posting. You can design what fields it has and how they is displayed. Typically a node will consist of a heading, some body text, maybe an image, etc. Drupal assigns two URL addresses to each node, a human-friendly one made of words, and a nid, or node id.)
Note: Earlier, there used to be a migrate_plus module in Drupal 8 core which contained all the pieces of migrate functionality that wasn’t able to make it in the Drupal 7 core. It contained all the plugins for the support of XML, CSV and JSON data sources along with the support for databases like MS SQL or Oracle. This module has now been split into different modules, namely migrate_plus, migrate_tools and migrate_source_csv. After clicking Continue, you will be brought to the screen in the following screenshot. Enter all the required details such as your existing website’s credentials, the database location and the location of your website files.
If you’re migrating from a previous version of Drupal, start with our Preparing for a Drupal-to-Drupal Migration tutorial. From there you’ll learn how to perform a basic update using either the built in UI or the contributed Drush commands, as well as some common best practices to help things go as smoothly as possible. If you’re looking to customize your Drupal-to-Drupal migration a bit, continue through the tutorials on writing custom migrations, and then we’ll go in-depth on how to use those skills to tailor the Drupal-to-Drupal update process to your specific use-case.
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.
If you already have a Drupal website that has a considerable amount of content or a large number of users or has custom functionality you want to keep, though, you might want to try directly upgrading the site to use the distribution. Doing so could save you a lot of time in migrating content. But it will also raise a number of challenges. Upgrading to a distribution is probably something you should try only if you have the skills and time needed to do troubleshooting and some custom data work.
Though it’s been over three years since Drupal 8 launched, many companies using Drupal to power their digital experiences have yet to upgrade Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 due to the complexities involved. Many Drupal agencies and general Drupal users have found out the hard way that making the jump from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is actually more like a re-build instead of an upgrade. Meanwhile, Drupal continues to release updates to the Drupal 8 core framework, and Drupal 9 is on the horizon for release in mid-2020. As such, the longer these companies put off the Drupal 8 upgrade, the more difficult that eventual upgrade will be when they’re forced to make it. See more info on https://www.95visual.com/blog/migrating-from-drupal-7-to-drupal-8-and-beyond.