migrate

May 19 Update: It was a total success, yay! This site is now running Drupal 8.

Over 100 days in, the big day has finally arrived—it's time to upgrade this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8! The entire process has been documented, one hour at a time, in my 'Drupal 7 to 8' live streams. Visit that link to view all the previous episodes, from setting up a new Drupal codebase, to running the first test drush migrate-upgrade command, to upgrading this site's theme from PHPtemplate in Drupal 7 to Twig in Drupal 8.

Some of the highlights:

I just finished delivering my CMS Philly How I am migrating JeffGeerling.com from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 presentation, which summarizes the first 100 days (1-2 hours per week) migrating this website from D7 to D8.

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

The slides are available from SlideShare:

This website is currently (as of February 2020) running on Drupal 7. Drupal 8 was released in November 2015—half a decade ago. Drupal 7 support has been extremely long-lived, as it will not be end-of-life'd until November 2021. As with all software, once it is out of date, and security patches are no longer provided, it becomes harder to ensure the software is secure, much less running well on the latest servers and PHP versions!

Therefore, I decided it was time to start migrating JeffGeerling.com to Drupal 8. And I figured instead of fumbling through the process all by myself, and maybe posting a couple blog posts about the process at the end, I'd adopt a new mantra: Let's fail together! (Just kidding—sorta.)

tl;dr: Subscribe to my YouTube Channel; I'm going to start migrating this website to Drupal 8 on a livestream every Tuesday at 10 a.m. US Central (3 p.m. UTC).

Ever since Drupal 8 was released, I've been waffling on the decision to migrate/upgrade this website (JeffGeerling.com) to Drupal 8. The site started off years ago as a static HTML site generated by Thingamablog, a really old Java-based static blog generator.

In the years since, I migrated from Thingamablog to Drupal 6, and from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Each of these migrations also incorporated a complete redesign, and I did another semi-redesign halfway through the Drupal 7 lifecycle, to the design you see today:

Dark mode ftw!

Thoughts about Drupal 8, Drupal 7, Backdrop, the Drupal Community, DrupalCon's meteoric price increases, DrupalCamps, and the future of the framework/CMS/enterprise experience engine that is Drupal have been bubbling up in the back of my mind for, well, years now.

I am almost always an optimist about the future, and Drupal 8 promised (and usually delivered) on many things:

• Vastly improved content administration
• Views in core, and even better than ever
• Media in core
• Layouts in core
• Modern programming paradigms (fewer #DrupalWTFs)
• 'Getting off the island' and becoming more of a normal PHP application (kinda the opposite of something like Wordpress)

But one thing that has always been annoying, and now is probably to the state of alarming, for some, is the fact that Drupal 8 adoption has still not hit a level of growth which will put it ahead of Drupal 7 adoption any time soon.

tl;dr: If you want to skip the 'how-to' part and explanation, check out the pix_migrate example Drupal 8 migration module on GitHub.

For a couple years, I wanted to work on my first personal site migration into Drupal 8, for the last Drupal 6 site I had running on my servers. I've run a family photo/audio/video sharing website since 2009, and through the years it has accumulated hundreds of galleries, and over 20,000 media items.

The home page of the Drupal 8 photo sharing website.

Today I needed to migrate a URL/Link into a Drupal 8 site, and I was scratching my head over how to migrate it so there were distinct values for the URL (the actual link) and the Label (the 'title' that displays to end users and is clickable). Drupal 8's Link field type allows you to set a URL in addition to an optional (or required) label, but by default, if you just migrate the URL, the label will be blank.

I first set up the migration config like so:

And source_url was defined in the migration's source.fields configuration.

In my case, the source data didn't have a label, but I wanted to set a default label so the Drupal 8 site could display that as the clickable link (instead of an ugly long URL). To do that, it's similar to migrating a formatted text field, where you can migrate individual components of the field using the syntax [field_name]/[component]. In a Link field's case, it looks like:

On a recent project, there was a Migration run that took a very long time, and I couldn't pinpoint why; there were multiple migrations, and none of the others took very long at all (usually processing at least hundreds if not thousands of nodes per minute). In Drupal 7, if you enabled the XHProf module, then you'd get a checkbox on the configuration page that would turn on profiling for all page requests and Drush commands.

In Drupal 8, the XHProf module was completely rewritten, and as a side effect, the Drush/CLI profiling functionality is not yet present (see: Profile drush/CLI with XHProf in Drupal 8).

Since I don't have the time right now to help figure out how to get things working through the official XHProf module, I decided to use a 'poor man's profiling' method to profile a Migration run:

June 2016 Update: Times change fast! Already, the migrate_source_json module mentioned in the post has been (mostly) merged directly into the migrate_plus module, so if you're building a new migration now, you should use the migrate_plus JSON plugin if at all possible. See Mike Ryan's blog post Drupal 8 plugins for XML and JSON migrations for more info.

Recently I needed to migrate a small set of content into a Drupal 8 site from a JSON feed, and since documentation for this particular scenario is slightly thin, I decided I'd post the entire process here.

I was given a JSON feed available over the public URL http://www.example.com/api/products.json which looked something like:

For a recent project, I needed to migrate anything inside <script> and <style> tags that were embedded with other content inside the body field of Drupal 6 nodes into separate Code per Node-provided fields for Javascript and CSS. (Code per Node is a handy module that lets content authors easily manage CSS/JS per node/block, and saves the styles and scripts to the filesystem for inclusion when the node is rendered—read more about CPN goodness here).

The key is to get all the styles and scripts into a string (separately), then pass that data into an array in the format: