If you are on an older version of Drupal, now is the time to upgrade (migrate) to Drupal 8. Your site's security might be at risk, and its performance degraded as a result. Our Drupal migration experts will perform a complimentary initial assessment of your site, and provide you guidance on how to upgrade your site.
Drupal 8 was released in November, 2015, with over 200 new features (and many more since). The new features offer benefits to all your website stakeholders. It provides a significantly better authoring environment, is much quicker to set up, and provides very nice improvements for site builders and developers. These improvements equate to a better visitor user experience.
With the release of Drupal 8.6.0, it is now easier than ever to migrate* a Drupal 6 or 7 site to Drupal 8. We were able to complete the majority of the migration of BYU’s multilingual Sophie site from Drupal 6 to the latest version of 8 after a few simple configuration steps. This helped drastically reduce the migration costs, as no code or complex configurations were required.
We also found we didn’t have to sacrifice any features or functionality when moving that site to Drupal 8. But if migration cost alone is not enough of a reason to migrate, we explore many other factors to consider in our blog post.
Transform your business with Drupal 8
Drupal 8 offers a beautiful new easy-to-use authoring environment that gives you far greater control over your website's layout, and advanced features to help streamline the user experience, including:
- Improved Security
- Responsive Design and Content Management
- Mobile First themes
- Improved Scalability and Performance.
Test Drive Our Drupal 8 Demo Site
We've developed a Drupal 8 demo website for you to explore and edit, without having to installing it yourself. You can request access to the sample site, which gives access to the authoring environment, and walkthrough Drupal 8 demo video tours to help.
Drupal Updates, Upgrades, & Migrations
For Drupal Updates, see our Drupal Security, Support, and Maintenance services page.
At Webdrips, we've handled complete website migrations, including HTML/CSS-based sites to Drupal, database-driven CMS-based sites to Drupal, Drupal to Drupal upgrades and migrations, WordPress to Drupal, and even Ubercart to Drupal Commerce shopping cart migrations. There are many ways to migrate a site, so let's sit down and figure out the best way for your website. For complex migrations, there's the Drupal Migrate Module, and for simpler migrations, the Drupal Feeds module may work just fine.
Migrating from Drupal 6/7 to Drupal 8 is significantly more straigforward. Drupal 8 has over 200 new features and improvements, including: extensive administrative tools, improved security, streamlined editing, enriched accessibility and much more. Regardless of which version of Drupal you're migrating from, Webdrips' team of engineers is here to help.
If you are currently running a Drupal 6 site, that version of Drupal is no longer supported, and your site is probably vulnerable to hackers. If you are not sure which version of Drupal you are currently running, please feel free to reach out to us.
For Drupal upgrades, we carefully scan all existing modules to both find out if they're being used, and determine if there's an upgrade path. Then we upgrade Drupal core, followed by one module at a time until the process is complete. The final step here is cleanup of any issues encountered during the upgrade, and in many cases re-applying some configuration that got lost in the process.
Converting from an HTML-based website to a Drupal CMS-based site is typically very straightforward, and involves the following process:
- Review your current site and map all the various content areas and sections into the field and entity equivalent in Drupal.
- (Optional) Identify a content tagging hierarchy so that tagging may be applied during migration, even if it's not immediately put to use.
- Identify all of your current dynamic content, and decide how to best convert it to follow Drupal best practices.
- Determine if there's any new functionality that may be added out of box or with minimal additional effort. For example, Drupal provides RSS feeds out-of-box.
- Next we'll find a base theme that most closely matches the current skin of your website, yet also will allow for future enhancements and compatibility with up-and-coming specifications like HTML5 and CSS3.
- Migrate the static content. This can be completely manual or completely automated, depending on the number of pages among other factors.
- Sign-off on the data model: are all the page types and fields in place and configured properly? Are images and files placed in the proper directory (folder) on the server? Does the content editor workflow meet expectations? Typically this is straightforward when converting an HTML-based sight to CMS because existing workflows and configurations were not in place to begin with.
- "Drupalize" the code for displaying existing dynamic content.
- Apply the theme (skin) to the static/dynamic content.
- Final signoff that static and dynamic content are displaying the same (or better) than the old site.
All of the other migrations discussed below include most/all of the above steps (except for Ubercart to Drupal Commerce migrations, but the overall concepts are the same).
Get more flexibility and speed by migrating from Joomla, Magento, WordPress, or any other open source or proprietary CMS to Drupal. No matter what CMS you are migrating from, our knowledgeable team of Drupal professionals will find a customized solution to ensure a seamless and easy migration process.
The process for converting an existing CMS to Drupal is essentially the same as the HTML to Drupal covered above. However, an in-depth study of the PHP code to display static or dynamic content and pull in related content is required. In addition, recreating and improving the content adding/editing workflow is typically required, as content editors expect a new CMS to be as intuitive as the old one.
This is another relatively painless migration with the aid of the Drupal WordPress Migrate module. We've used this module, and found the process relatively painless.
Essentially what we're doing here is migrating a shopping cart from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce. It's not as painful a task as you might think, so please get in touch to learn more.
Our Drupal Migration Consulting specialists can carefully analyze your current website to uncover weak points, determine what version of Drupal to use (Drupal 7 or Drupal 8), and what modules need to be used, migrated or developed from scratch to get desired functionality.