Upgrading a website script version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Drupal 8 upgrade guide? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : Where does my Drupal installation live? Well, if your first step has been to download Drupal to your computer, it won’t be able to work there. It likes to live on a server, not on your computer at home. In the future, when you’ve developed your new site a bit, you’ll want to put it on the internet, and your Drupal installation will sit on your server in a little folder. That’s where it’s happiest. In the beginning though, if you’re going to build your site on your computer at home, you’ll need to download a pretend server environment, like Dev Desktop from Acquia, http://www.acquia.com/downloads, that will let you run Drupal on your computer.
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. 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.
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.
Here are basic steps to take to upgrade an existing Drupal site to use a distribution. These are rough guidelines only. Because each site and each distribution is configured differently, you’re likely to run into additional complexities. But these notes should at least get you started in the right direction. Select a distribution to use. You’ll want to find the distribution that most closely matches your site requirements. See the listings and comparisons of Drupal distributions on drupal.org.
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.” Read extra details at https://www.95visual.com/blog/migrating-from-drupal-7-to-drupal-8-and-beyond.
