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Upgrading a website script version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8? 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.

Drupal 8 turned one in the November of 2016. It is about time that the Drupal 7 website owners and administrators should start considering upgrading the websites to Drupal 8. With the Drupal team focused on improving Drupal 8, it is inevitable that Drupal 7 will stop getting official updates in the near future. The great thing about upgrading to Drupal 8 is the remarkably easy process as a result of the inclusion of a few great migration modules in its core. After proceeding, you will be brought to the Migrate UI where you can check all the potential issues and errors that you might encounter as well as all the available and the missing paths. Go through this screen and when satisfied, start the migration.

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.

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.

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.

You must first understand how your current site is built, and this starts with taking an accurate inventory of the Drupal modules you are currently using. This information is pretty easy to find (Administer > Site building > Modules, or go to the Available Updates page at admin/reports/updates), and this type of preparation will come in handy a bit later in your upgrade process. Will I still need this particular module in Drupal 8? Your Drupal developers are best positioned to answer this question, and they’ll certainly need some knowledge of Drupal 8 core modules ahead of time before giving a definitive “yes” or “no.” See extra details on Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.