Upgrading a website software version is one of the most complicated task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. How to do a Drupal 8 upgrade? 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. After proceeding, you will be brought to the Migrate UI where you can check all the potential issues and errors that you might encounter as well as all the available and the missing paths. Go through this screen and when satisfied, start the migration.
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.
Update your site to the latest version of Drupal 6 (core and contributed modules). Before upgrading to Drupal 7, disable and uninstall modules you know you won’t be using in the new site. To help determine which modules to uninstall, you could review the list of modules included in the distribution, which often are found in the download in the directory profiles/[distribution_name]/modules. If a given module is not in the distribution and you don’t foresee needing its functionality on your new site, you may choose to uninstall it.
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. Content types and fields. You may have existing content types on your site that overlap with those provided by the distribution. For example, if you have an existing content type called ‘news’, it might have a function very close to that of an ‘article’ content provided by one of the features you’ve enabled. To begin to use the new feature’s functionality, you could consider converting the existing ‘news’ content into ‘article’ content. See extra info at Drupal 7 Upgrade.