Migrating a website script version is one of the highest risk procedure a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Drupal 8 Migration? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : Be careful where you put your optional modules and themes. Within the folders of your Drupal installation, there is a folder called ‘modules’ and one called ‘themes.’ These are NOT where you should put any contributed modules and themes that you add to your core installation. These folders are just for the core modules and themes. The folders you should use are a second set also called modules and themes, which sit within the ‘sites’ folder in your Drupal installation.

First of all, make a list of all the contributed modules on your current website. Next, check whether these modules have a Drupal 8 compatible version. In case of unavailability of the Drupal 8 version, the migration process will suffer. Fortunately, Drupal 8 has come a long way and many of the major modules now do support Drupal 8. You can check all the available update paths through the Migrate UI modules. When done with the installation of the modules, you will have to navigate to the upgrade path. For this, go to www.yoursite.com/upgrade (remember to replace yoursite with the name of your Drupal 8 website). You will be brought to the following screen. Please make sure you follow the directions on the screen before proceeding.

Upgrading is the process of moving your site from a previous major version of Drupal to a newer version, for example from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. This consists of upgrading the codebase to the appropriate version and then migrating the data from your old site into the new one. Drupal 8 core contains two modules to help facilitate this process: Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI.

Drupal distributions are usually used as a starting point for developing a new website. The most straightforward way to use a distribution is to install it from scratch. From there, you can selectively migrate in content from other sources, including one or more existing websites. Migrating data here might be as simple as copying and pasting several pages from an old site into the new site. For larger sites, it could involve writing custom migration scripts or using an existing Drupal module like Migrate or Feeds.

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. Roles. Many distributions will create one or more custom roles. Examples include contributor, editor, and administrator. If any of these roughly correspond to existing roles on your site, delete the roles created by the distribution and rename the existing ones to use the distribution role names. For example, if your site has a role called “site administrator” and the distribution has created a role called “administrator”, delete the newly created “administrator” role and rename “site administrator” to “administrator”. After adjusting the role names, visit admin/config/people/accounts, ensure the “administrator” role is selected as the “Administrator role”, and save the form. Consolidating the roles in this way will get you the functionality of the distribution’s roles and permissions while maintaining your existing users’ role allocations. See extra details on Upgrading to Drupal 8.