Migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

Drupal has been a superior website framework which has gained adaption globally. It is used as a backend framework for web content management of major websites worldwide these days. It is a user friendly system that allows even the non-technical users to work with the content without having much knowledge about website development. Drupal has evolved as a more flexible and better tool to design websites as compared to other content management framework tools.

Drupal has got Drupal 7.x and the latest Drupal 8 versions that lets developers develop services. The 7.x version has proved to be a trustworthy and easy tool. Though being a good CMS, it has got some limitations that were taken into consideration while developing the D8 version. D7 has an incomplete API (Application Programming Interface), a lack of separation between the presentation and logic and such drawbacks. It also has got lesser clarity in the separation between the content and configuration of the web content. In spite of creating solutions to overcome these drawbacks, they did not turn out to be sufficient. Considering these hitches, Drupal developed the current version 8.

The Drupal Development Company has come up with D8 which is the newest version that includes new coding standards, user interfaces and mobile capabilities along with APIs, amongst many other changes. For website builders, D8 will stand more useful and capable than D7 as the modules included in D8 are available as only add-ons for D7. The extra features and modules in D8 include Views module, fields such as Link, E-mail, Telephone Number and Date, etc. Unlike Drupal 7, Drupal 8 has multilingual capabilities, which lets the users translate anything in the system. Drupal 8 is more responsive as compared to the earlier versions of Drupal. Drupal 8 has new features including mobile friendly themes, inline editor, Symfony framework that makes it easy to maintain and reuse, CkEditor for editing web pages, and feature of REST (Representation State Transfer) for creating and updating resources. It has a new PHP based theme engine called Twig, which is secure and fast.  

Considering the advantageous features of D8, the present D6 and D7 users are migrating to D8. The Drupal 8 includes core modules such as Migrate, Migrate Drupal and Migrate Upgrade to help existing users of Drupal 7 to migrate to Drupal 8. The Migrate module is a base module that lets users create their own custom migrations. The Migrate Drupal helps in migrating content and components like nodes, users, fields and more from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8. The Migrate Upgrade is a developing module that provides user interface for migration. Other migration tools and plug-ins that make the migration to Drupal 8 smoother include Migrate Plus, Migrate Tools and Migration plug-ins.

Considering all the above mentioned new features of Drupal 8, it will emerge as a great tool for CMS. It will eventually provide both the developers as well as clients better experience. Taking into account these characteristics as compared to Drupal 6 or 7, it will be less complicated to build, use, migrate and support websites using Drupal 8. Regardless of the features, using the most recent version in the series is highly advisable.