Upgrading a website script version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Migrating from Drupal 7? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : How to log into your site in maintenance mode. If you put your site into maintenance mode (using the configuration page of the admin section of your site), it will not be accessible to internet users who are not logged into the site. This is handy to keep it hidden while you’re still developing it. If you go ahead and log out of the site, however, it will not be accessible to you either. Ooops! The solution is to go to www.nameofyoursite.com/user/login. Then you can log back in.
The very first thing you should do is to make a local version of the website. This is an essential step because making changes to a live website is very risky and is never a recommended practice. This way, if anything does go awry, your actual website will remain safe and functional. 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.
The Drupal core migration system is used for both importing data from custom sources, and for migrating content and configuration from previous versions of Drupal into Drupal 8 — effectively updating your site from one major version to another. Depending on which of these two tasks you’re performing you’ll use the tools in different ways.
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. Blocks and contexts. Many distributions use the Context module to position blocks. Your existing site may use the core Block module for this purpose, may use Context or some other tool, or may use a combination of tools for block placement. With your new distribution’s blocks displaying as well as those enabled by your existing site, you may get more than you need or want. To address this issue, selectively disable blocks left over from your existing site. If they were custom blocks, you may wish to delete them.
Update your site to the latest version of Drupal 6 (core and contributed modules). Before upgrading to Drupal 7, disable and uninstall modules you know you won’t be using in the new site. To help determine which modules to uninstall, you could review the list of modules included in the distribution, which often are found in the download in the directory profiles/[distribution_name]/modules. If a given module is not in the distribution and you don’t foresee needing its functionality on your new site, you may choose to uninstall it.
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 details about Drupal 7 Migration.