Updating a website script version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Upgrading to Drupal 8? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : How to see the NID of a node. If the node is in ‘edit’ mode, you can see the nid in the URL. (A node, in case you’re wondering, is a page like an article or a forum posting. You can design what fields it has and how they is displayed. Typically a node will consist of a heading, some body text, maybe an image, etc. Drupal assigns two URL addresses to each node, a human-friendly one made of words, and a nid, or node id.)
The very first thing you should do is to make a local version of the website. This is an essential step because making changes to a live website is very risky and is never a recommended practice. This way, if anything does go awry, your actual website will remain safe and functional. Though not yet perfect, the upgrade procedure in Drupal has come quite a long way. As you can see in this tutorial, the upgrade process is now very streamlined and is an integral part of the Drupal Core. If you liked this blog post, then give a read to another blog post by us on, How To Update Drupal 8 Core.
The upgrade process, and underlying Migration API, are still evolving. We don’t anticipate them changing dramatically even though they are still marked experimental. Beware of any resources that were written before Drupal 8.1.x was released (April 19, 2016) as the system changed considerably in ways that invalidate many of the older articles.
If you already have a Drupal website that has a considerable amount of content or a large number of users or has custom functionality you want to keep, though, you might want to try directly upgrading the site to use the distribution. Doing so could save you a lot of time in migrating content. But it will also raise a number of challenges. Upgrading to a distribution is probably something you should try only if you have the skills and time needed to do troubleshooting and some custom data work.
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. Most distributions are built using the Features module, which allows exporting configuration from a Drupal site – content types, fields, views, and so on – into code, so that it can be enabled on multiple sites. For components like content types and fields to be exportable, they need to have a “machine name”–a unique name that will be the same on every site they’re enabled on. For example, a date-type field used to store the date of an event might have the machine name field_date. See more details at Upgrading from Drupal 7.
