April Meetup: Migrating to Drupal 8

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stephelhajj's picture
Start: 
2016-03-08 19:50 UTC
Event type: 
User group meeting

Join us at our April Drupal Users Group Meetup.

Presenter: Brandon Williams

Topic: Migrating to Drupal 8

This month we'll learn how migrations in Drupal 8 work by looking at two Drupal 7 sites. A "simple" blog with 9 contrib modules, and a "complicated" site with lots of contrib, content translations, custom themes and modules.

Migrate or upgrade? In previous versions of drupal, when you wanted to move to the next major release you could do an in-place upgrade. That meant you upgraded the code in place and it updated the database in place. This was prone to errors and confusion, and if you weren't doing this on a test site there was a chance you could mess up the live site.

For Drupal 8, migration is now the supported method for upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7. That's right, you can migrate directly from 6 to 8 and skip 7! With a migration, you install a new Drupal 8 site, and add the database connection information of you're old site. Then Drupal will migrate the data over, without changing the old site, into Drupal 8.