My next steps for Drupal 8 migration

mikeryan Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - 09:02am

To expand on the “Going forward” section of my last blog post, there’s still a lot of work to be done to get the migration ecosystem for Drupal 8 up to the level it was for Drupal 7 - as well as taking it beyond, as I believe the D8 architecture enables far more powerful and flexible tools. As an independent consultant, I have a more flexible schedule and more time for pure community work, but with great flexibility comes great… dithering.

MidCamp 2016

mikeryan Friday, April 1, 2016 - 10:07am
As a newly-minted midwestern Drupal shop, having this year's MidCamp taking place the very week of my transition was irresistible. So, on St. Patrick's Day I hopped on the Saluki to Chicago (alas, too late to see the green river). I did, however, arrive in time to catch a couple hours of the training day sprint, where I met dawehner face-to-face for the first time (one of the great things about cons and camps is, of course, putting faces to names). Topped off the day with a meat & three at County BBQ - their brisket was if anything even more tender than Pat's back home in Murphysboro, but not quite as tasty.

A personal migration

mikeryan Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - 02:35pm
All things must pass... After four and a half years with Acquia, the time is ripe for me to return to the consulting world. I've resurrected a pre-Drupal d.b.a., Virtuoso Performance, and will be doing Drupal migration consulting under that moniker going forward. I appreciate my time at Acquia - I've learned a lot, and worked with some great people - but I miss the freedom and flexibility of consulting.

Business models

Generally, in the past I've been involved in migration projects from end-to-end:
  1. Analyzing source data, and working with site-builders and stakeholders to work out what legacy data maps to what Drupal entities.
  2. Architecting the migration implementation - figuring out an optimal class hierarchy, constructing the initial implementation, etc.

Drupal 8 migration - all the modules

mikeryan Friday, November 20, 2015 - 04:53pm
Now that Drupal 8.0.0 is released, let's take a look at all the components of the Drupal migration ecosystem and where they stand now. To provide context to those familiar with migration under Drupal 7, I will show where the pieces came from. First, general migration support:
FeatureD7D8D8 status
Basic migration frameworkmigrate (contrib)migrate (core), plus destination plugins in core modulesExperimental
General-purpose drush commandsmigrate (contrib)migrate_tools (contrib)The most common commands (ms, mi, mr, etc.) are working

migrate_plus splits up

mikeryan Monday, November 9, 2015 - 06:59pm
For anyone currently using the migrate_tools (drush and UI tools for managing migrations) or migrate_source_csv (CSV source plugin) submodules of migrate_plus with their Drupal 8 migration projects, a heads-up - they're being split off into separate projects.

What's happening

New projects have been created for migrate_tools and migrate_source_csv. The plan is to create real (beta or RC) releases for these projects by next Monday, November 16. On that day, a release of migrate_plus will be cut that no longer contains those two modules.

What do I do about it?

Upgrading to Drupal 8 using Drush

mikeryan Wednesday, October 21, 2015 - 06:37pm
So, perhaps you've been reading Upgrading to Drupal 8 using the UI and thinking "hey, what about us cool kids who use Drush for everything?". Or, maybe you just know drush is better than a UI for running long processes like migrations. Well, this blog post is for you... We do have drush commands for running and rolling back upgrades, currently in the migrate_upgrade module (but which should land in Drush itself by Drupal's 8.1 release at the latest).

Upgrading to Drupal 8 using the UI

mikeryan Wednesday, October 21, 2015 - 06:36pm
Now that the second Drupal 8 release candidate (RC2) is available (with a significant fix for those upgrading from Drupal 6), it's time to start planning for your upgrade from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7. As I previously wrote, the migration system is "experimental" in 8.0, and at this time (mid-October 2015) the tools for upgrading are in a contributed module, Drupal Upgrade. The plan is that the upgrade path will be fully supported in core for Drupal 8.1 - to reach that goal, however, we need the path to be tested on a wide variety of sites in the meantime. So, we encourage everyone with a Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site to start testing the upgrade path today - you don't want Drupal 8.1 to come out and only then discover your site has some quirk that's not fully accounted for. Even better, you might fight the upgrade path works just fine for your site and you can upgrade in the Drupal 8.0 timeframe! The current documentation for performing your upgrade from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8 is on drupal.org - I'll walk through the process as it exists today, but should you be referring to this blog post after October 2015, be sure to review the official documentation for any changes. This post explains running the upgrade process through the Drupal 8 web interface - if you'd prefer to use Drush, please see Upgrading to Drupal 8 using Drush.