Best Practices for Migrating to Drupal 9

yeah we can kick off um with a few introductions uh hello everyone i'm jesse golembecki i'm the occurrence marketing manager in my role at mediacurrent i create and execute marketing strategies working alongside many departments within our company my name is damien mckenna i'm community leader media current in addition to working on client projects i lead our company's internal and external contribution efforts and help make sure all of our staff know how to work with drupal.org and its wide variety of tools hi matt webmore i am the director of web ops here at aqua i'm primarily responsible for aqua.com and a lot of our other marketing properties and we have a number of developers that are working on our site and making it the best it can be and i'm ryan pikini i'm really excited to be with everyone today so thank you so much for joining us i'm the director of product marketing for aqueous drupal cloud some of you may know that aquia has we have built out a suite of digital experience capabilities that fall into two clouds our drupal cloud and our marketing cloud and i'm responsible for product working for the drupal cloud yeah we can kick it off a little bit about uh media current and aqua uh so media current we are the open source expansion partner what this means is that we help organizations that want to elevate and advance their open source digital experience we do this by aligning with our partners business goals and needs and solve them with open source technologies as a full service digital agency we have been focused on drupal since 2007 and work with clients anywhere from mid-sized businesses to name recognizable high-profile enterprise brands we have a team of developers digital strategists research designers and innovators who thrive on solving the most complex challenges and we've been a partner of acquia since 2008. great thanks jessie and aquia um awkwee has a unique relationship to drupal in that the founder of drupal serves as the cto of aqua and we've created a set of technologies that complement and enhance drupal the the foundation for most brands and organizations digital experience is content but over the course of the last 10 years it has evolved organizations want to do more and more with digital so they want to use data to inform that content and make it relevant for their customers they want to launch a variety of campaigns and have the right management and operations around those campaigns they want to improve their devops as it relates to drupal so they can deliver more efficiently and so awkway has built out this end end platform for digital experience management with drupal as the foundation we are the only gartner leader in their digital experience management report of a technology uh provider that is using drupal as the foundation we are very well established company we have over 4 000 customers and you can see a good portion of the fortune 1000 1100 employees worldwide with offices all over the globe so the combination of media currents um domain expertise and agency capabilities with aqueous technology to kind of enhance drupal is usually a winning recipe for our our customers and in creating great experiences with drupal and so most of you on the line are familiar with drupal as a framework but for those of you who are relatively new to drupal or only kind of scratch the surface i just want to spend a minute or two talking about what drupal is and why you should care and so for those of you who don't know drupal has been around for about 20 years it's a very established technology but it has grown pardon me exponentially over the course of the last you know five to ten years as organizations recognize that the world is changing and they need a framework and a solution that's flexible that's fast and interoperates with a variety of other systems and processes that help deliver a great digital experience so drupal is is software that's used for a variety variety of these digital experiences whether it's a corporate website for a large organization um it's a portfolio of sites for someone like nestle who has both brand sites and campaign sites in their corporate site and it's even used for things like intranets for companies who are trying to effectively create a great employee experience so one of the things that the customers and organizations love who use drupal is the ability to deploy it across a variety of experiences and the flexibility and speed in which it can be delivered if you want to flip the next slide please jesse you can see that drupal on this slide is is very well adopted and established in the marketplace and has a robust community that's driving that innovation um so you can see one out of 30 sites in the world run on drupal in comparison to some of the other kind of enterprise content management systems it's far above and beyond um anyone else's reach within that enterprise category i'm not sure why some of the bullets aren't loading here okay there you go but you have 35 000 active contributors to the drupal community and you have 45 000 modules and what this means is there's tons of innovation that's going on within this community and there's pretty much for any kind of experience that you want to build there's already pre-built components that can be assembled to help expedite whatever kind of digital experience your organization is focused on and so with drupal being delivering digital content and more and more of the buyer's journey moving online it's become a more and more relevant framework and obviously with kovid it has accelerated the pace that organizations need to adopt digital as their primary customer engagement channel and if you flip the next slide please jesse um at the heart of any brand's success is loyalty and awareness and historically this has been an equation at least over the last five years that was partially in person delivered through in-person relationships and partially delivered through digital experiences um but now the with the um the the pace of change with kovid this brand loyalty and awareness is primarily taking place online because retail stores aren't open b2b companies can't go out and see their customers because of limitations for covid and so next slide please jesse you can see that content is the lifeblood of that buyer's journey on digital channels obviously data informs that content there's operational processes that need to take place you need to have the right architecture but what the customer sees is content what the customer experiences is content with an organization and so um drupal is is really kind of at the at the intersection of what companies need given what's going on in the world right now and if you flip the next slide please jesse that what most organizations have seen when trying to figure out how to get the right content out so they can build brand awareness and loyalty is that they have each of these choi they have a variety of choices and these choices are are beneficial in some capacity but they have limitations in others so for example a traditional cms tool is really great with it leaders who are focused on compliance and security and workflows and even maybe traditional like a corporate marketing team who's developed some competency however they've really fallen down with the folks who are trying to create the content on a day-to-day basis they're not easy to use and they're not designed for marketers and so that's why you've seen the emergence of consumer site building tools and this category might be you know this this category could include things like wix and squarespace and wordpress but the limitations of the consumer site building tools are that they don't meet the needs of i.t they aren't they struggle with security um they struggle with uh compliance and governance and so um then it leaves the last option which is emerging maybe a decoupled cms or custom often what the challenge that comes with these solutions is that they are complex to manage and there's a lot of maintenance that goes into them and it's a lot of effort to deliver on the kind of experience that you want to and so that's why you know in addition to covid expediting digital as the primary customer engagement channel drupal and he flipped to the next slide has risen to the top in this environment because it provides the best of all three that organizations need so drupal has always been enterprise ready um very secure platform there's there's a ton of governance that goes into it um with the community and organizations like aqua and media current have really kind of helped with the historical ease of use challenge that might have gone into drupal and it's really made tremendous slides so it's it's simple to use for marketers and they love it because they can still get content live fast and then the the flexibility that drupal provides has always been something that's been of value and so um that is still there that still remains that's part of the community and all the extensions and and modules that are built and so um drupal is in a really unique place right now because it gives organizations the best of all three in one platform and with that the launch of drupal 9 has been has even strengthened drupal's position in the market um and i'm going to pass it over to i think damien or matt here to talk about why drupal 9 um has kind of taken drupal to the next level and and why we're really excited about it what's that mean okay yeah yeah i think so triple nine is incredibly important for what yeah yeah there you go so um drupal 9 is incredibly important because it's really the easiest upgrade that we've had in a very long time if anyone's been around for drupal 6 or drupal 7 um and even going from drupal 7 to drupal 8 this is definitely one of the easiest that we've ever had to do and a lot of the modules were available and ready to go from day one so it's incredibly important and it provides a lot of new underlying technology and features that will make it easier to sustain and kind of push drupal forward as we move along for years to come so again as theresa said a couple of times a couple of times the big deal about drupal 9 is it should not be a big deal most people should be able to upgrade there should be no real need to migrate content structures or anything else from going from eight to nine and then that should continue into the future through nine to ten and other versions um do you wanna talk about semantic version yes so apologies so the biggest change despite all of the new functionality that is in nine with the layout builder and [Music] the migrate system and the media improvements the biggest foundational change is with semantic versioning it's a standard process in use throughout the world for most software projects where you split up the releases into major releases mine releases and patch releases the idea is that a patch release is just normal bug fix or security fix and when you update from one to the other you're only dealing with small minor fixes with a minor release that's where there's the opportunity to add new functionality and then also while you're adding things also realize that some of the apis and things that were in the previous releases need to be deprecated because you've come up with a better way of doing something and then with the major release all you do is remove the things that are deprecated and release it as is and you can see that with the drupal 8 version history where with 8.0.0 it was a brand new major release with a huge wealth of changes but then with the point releases it was just bug fixes it came time to the 8.1.0 releases and then the 8.2 and 8.3 and so on and each new point release added more functionality for example the migrate system was added in i think 8.3 and media system was added in another minor release and as new things were added apis were deprecated and eventually they got to the point of deciding okay we're going to release 9.0 and had it planned out to be in june and hit the deadline we're able to release 9.0.0 in june on schedule and the big win was that the only difference between 9.0 and the previous drupal 8 release was that the deprecated apis had been removed so in effect you could have the exact same site running 8.9 make sure your custom code is all up to date with the correct apis and there are 90 deprecated apis being used and you can switch core to 9 and run the exact same site without any other work and then as the future goes then we'll have we've had a 9.0.1 bug fix release we will there's plans for 9.1.0 feature release in december and it will continue like that and it's a major change because instead of having to do this massive rebuild from my major release to major release you're continuing to iterate over what you have on your project so you start with eight you do all of the upgrades along and then when nine comes out you just switch over and then the same deal will happen with drupal 10. cool so to kind of just wrap up the the section on eight to nine and that what that future model looks like in order to stay prepared for future drupal updates it kind of makes things a little bit easier so as you're developing on kind of newer drupal versions 9 plus in the future you'll kind of keep your modules updated making sure they're compatible the next major versions you'll make sure any of your custom code is compatible with that next major version and then you want to just stay up to date with minor dribble versions leading up to the next major release and then going forward when you get to that next major release you should just have to upgrade the modules and then move forward so that brings us to the point of today's presentation what to expect when upgrading to drupal 9 so from drupal 6 you're going to have to rebuild your theme you're going to have to work out new ways of handling the output you're going to have to rebuild views and a number of other things and then custom functionality will have to be rewritten similar story with drupal 7 again the new twig based theme system rebuild the output rebuild the views pages and look for replacements for custom functionality with drupal 8 you keep the same theme make sure it's code is up to date but you keep the same theme you keep the same apis presuming you've updated to remove deprecated ones you can keep the same views pages same contrib modules and all of the same custom functionality so let's look at upgrading from drupal 6 and 7 to drupal nine and with an emphasis on things we know versus things we don't so things we do know in advance we're going to need a new theme has been mentioned we're going to need to rebuild the output build new views pages etc custom functionality will have to be rebuilt what we don't know ahead of time is if there are any migration pieces that aren't built yet or if there might be some migration bugs so what we found is it's best to build a plan there are a number of steps to that you'll have to go through and the first and most important is defining done then build an inventory of the site work on preparations work on an initial migration and then improve the migration process with drush do a review and then refine and repeat until you reach your point of being done so when we talk about being done we're looking at is all of the content all of the nodes and terms copied over and have all of the data correct have all of the products in the store being copied over correctly are all of the user-generated content that the site had is that processed properly how about is there any pieces to the data that you really don't need anymore especially when you look at api changes and third-party service providers that have changed over the years is any of that not necessary anymore or do you have to have everything and that will help lead to working out how much work is needed and are you concerned about any errors if you've got millions of records and you hit one error how much time do you need to spend on that up front versus coming up with a workaround after the fact so a key thing is to build an inventory of your existing site have an understanding of what content types and taxonomy term pages you have what views pages you have what panels pages etc but have an understanding of what out of the box functionality there is then look at the custom functionality you've built on top of that any third-party integrations that you custom built any custom overrides that you need for compliance purposes all of those things and also get a make sure you've got a good inventory of the api keys that you use so along with that then also keep in mind how much of that is still needed did you build three content types that you had intended for this big new sub site within the system that say didn't launch or only ended having a couple of test pages built so you don't really need to migrate that content anymore so then once you've done that part then you start then you need to build a drupal 9 code base to import all of the data into and we recommend using composer to do that because it allows much a much better way of managing the code base and i like to build a just a simple install profile so in the profiles directory create a directory named say my site and then inside that create an info file with the same name and then just following the example here build a list of the modules that it's going to install so node module automatic cron taxonomy etc and any of the contrib modules that you know about that you need so the token module made a tag etc and then list some themes that you're going to have enabled by default and i also think it's worthwhile building a readme file dot txt your markdown is your preference but a way of documenting what you're doing and the processes and then once you have that done run an initial inc site build a site install using the installation profile and then use the migration module migrate drupal ui to do a test run to see what comes up out of the box you might realize oh migrating from drupal 6 we didn't have a node words module i need to go find the replacement for that and then you see the replacement for that is the migrate module you download that add it to your install file and just go through and see what might be missing and then repeat those processes until you're happy then i like to jump drop into working with drush josh is a command line tool that has been around for quite some time and lets you run a lot of commands more easily than stepping through the ui especially when you're doing something you want to repeat over and over so to do that you remove the migrate ui from the install profile and you add the migrate upgrade module which you need to also add to your composer then you add a couple of lines to your settings file to indicate what database you're copying from and then there's a drush command for running the for building the site install from scratch so it will empty the database and run your install profile that you name here and then you run the migrate upgrade command and you specifically tell it the migrate db key so the legacy db keys migrate which ties back to the value added in the databases list in the settings file and then you run the migrate import command and you tell it the group migrate drupal 7 and that limits the import to the import setup that was built by the migrate upgrade command okay so you end up with output like this it says you're about to drop all of the tables in the database and it shows the installation tasks it does and then it starts building the migration configuration and then it will run on migrating the data itself taking that a step further i like to create a a simple shell script called upgrade.sh or whatever you want to name it that runs those commands one after the other and then when you want to run your upgrade all you have to do is run one command for an example i use the dev system locally so when i'm running a site install or when i'm in my upgrade.sh file it runs the site install with the profile name and it creates an admin account and i tell it what database to use then i tell it to do the migrate upgrade i tell it the host name that it can find the images from and the other files i tell it which database to use and then i run the import off of the configuration that was created so um one useful thing about that is as you run it you might see that say the import fails after 30 items are done because this one file or one field doesn't have a module available to import the data from so or maybe there's an error with a blank no title you'd be surprised that one actually comes up on a lot of sites so you might see so what i do is i'll leave a note in the upgrade dot sh file that something causes this to fail and then i run it a second time so then if i run the upgrade.sh file it runs all through until it hits the first error and then it continues again and you can repeat that as often as you need until it gets to the end so once you have sorry to interject folks if you do have questions you can put them in the chat we might not get to them right away but we certainly will try to try to get to them throughout this webinar i know damian has laid out a very thoughtful prescriptive you know approach to this so if there are specific questions please don't hesitate to ask thank you so once you get through all of this then it's time to review the site review the content that has been imported a review all of the user data make sure that's all there and correct make sure the products are correct and all of the orders have all of the line items and all of the shipping details and everything and really look at this point to see is there anything missing maybe there were some fields that got missed somehow and at that point then you start refining the script you might like i mentioned it is surprising how many sites have a node title have content with a blank node title um even though that isn't strictly possible through the drupal system uh people have hacked their way around that and so you go back to the source and fix things at the source so the next time you run the upgrade it doesn't have those problems and is there any data cleanup like i mentioned are there all of these content types that you realize you know there's no content here we don't need this content type anymore and you can just delete them um are there module fixes you need to download maybe there are country modules that didn't upgrade some of the data for example it upgraded say one field but didn't support another maybe there are patches available or maybe you need to take some time and write some patches to help that process along and maybe there are some module replacements like i said in drupal 6 the standard seo module was the node words module in triple seven that was renamed so it might not be obvious what to look for so there might be some replacements there and this goes back to then once you go through all of that and repeat those steps and you'll eventually get the the idea is that you'll get the update script down to the point of only having to run the install the uh migrate in import command once because all of the errors have been fixed and all of the data is migrated over then you decide okay am i done yet have all of the requirements been met is all of the data moved over uh are is everything over in enough to be compliant with whatever uh regulations are overlooking this project and is there any further work needed to be done did you discover that certain data doesn't needs to be changed what else needs to be done so at that point then you have your migration ready but you can take it further you can look at adding automated testing a really great system is the b hat system that lets you step through the interface through a set of simple scripts to check to make sure functionality works the way it is expected so you can write your b hat tests for drupal 7 and then have them ready for drupal 8 to make sure that the functionality still works there maybe you want to automate the process maybe you could extend that script with or set it up on say jenkins or circle cia circle ci infrastructure or something so that say once a day you have it automatically run the upgrade to see with the latest and greatest content from production to see how everything works out then at some point you might decide you know we really need to delve deeper into this we want to say combine multiple content types into one we don't need an article and a blog content type we can just smush those together or maybe you decide you want to go in the other direction that one content type really needs to be split into two different things there's a wealth of possibilities at that point uh with drupal core's migrate system and obviously then you're going to have to finish the configuration there's going to be additional configuration you need to do with the drupal 8 site build a new search system with search api or lots of other details and obviously you're going to have to build a new theme and customize the output to fit your specific requirements and at that point then you are ready to get final sign off and launch the new site on drupal 9. so there is thankfully a huge amount of information available for related to drupal 9. on drupal.org slash 9 there's a nice landing page there with plenty of information and further links gabor hortski has built a really good presentation on the state of drupal 9 where things are and where it's leading to in the future and once like i mentioned once you get to a point if you decide you need to get in under the hood and start customizing the migration there's a wealth of documentation and support available for that on drupal.org as well so back to match all right actually before we get into this we had a few specific questions and maybe we can take those on before getting into the next section so um let's see um where should we start can we start with our pits question which is how to find which contrib modules might impact might be impacted by upgrade from eight point seven to eight point eight or eight point nine uh damien you're on your mute i was on mute thank you so with minor release updates the best thing to do is check the release notes for drupal core itself there was a note with 8.8 to make sure that you upgrade the path auto module to the latest version there to avoid some problems um those problems were worked out over time but it is still worth making sure that you keep everything up to date kind of together and the release notes are the best starting point thanks for that damian um another question that we had was and this might be for matt when upgrading to d9 do you have to bother with a content migration or can you just update the code through a composer uh yeah so going from drupal 8 to drupal 9 there's no need to bother with any kind of content migration using migrate you can just straight update your core and modules through composer and then you just might have to if you have any other kind of custom development that you've done on top of drupal through other modules you'll have to upgrade that too but um yeah so that should just work great thanks matt damian this one's probably for you which is about security um are there any specific security considerations to take into account when performing the upgrade so the let me see um one of the biggest issues that has kind of always sat around is situations where people have written custom php code through the ui and that can often be a a problem on older sites that was handled with the php module built into drupal core that module was removed from core interval 8 so it was no longer possible to write php code say into a view or into a block or a node um and that kind of goes back to having a good inventory of what's on the site it is strongly recommended to not do that it does open the doors for security problems if nothing else because it can make it a lot harder to find the code that your site needs to run and you also then can say run automated tests against the code itself to make sure that that code is written correctly using the proper apis etc i hope that answers the question thank you damian um there's another question in the chat is what are we are doing some seven to eight migrations is it possible to leapfrog tonight i mean i can take a first pass at that once that police said when he when he upgraded his blog from eight to nine given you know it wasn't a very complex site it took a few minutes so um i think that's that's one of the main takeaways here is that once you are on eight the transition to nine should be very simple we're not we're not talking about another migration we're talking about you know a few minutes or maybe uh maybe an hour or two to make that that transition to nine so matter damien is there anything you want to add there but i think it's maybe just one more small step yeah i mean i think i think if you're already going seven to eight um even if you're going seven to eight that then making that 8.9 transition would be even easier um so as long as you're kind of getting to that point in eight then just kind of taking that next step to nine would be pretty easy uh with one thing that might hold you back on to stick with eight is the contrib modules that your site depends upon or that you decide to use there has been a huge effort in the community to get contribute modules and themes ready for drupal 9 but some are not quite ready yet and so you might discover oh there are patches available but i can't apply them because composer so there's no harm in sticking with 8.9 for now and waiting for those modules to be available or stepping up and helping to co-maintain those and push them forward yourself nationally something that i think both aqua and media current have really invested in i don't know the exact stats but the vast majority of the widely adopted modules have been have been ported over to nine and are are ready to use so we can we can certainly follow up with some of those stats but d9 is there might be some one-off use cases but the vast majority will you should be able to transition right over there's a few questions in here that i think we will get to later around theme uh themes as well as actually there's a question here any guidance or steps from migration to adobe cq from adobe cq5 to drupal 9 yes we'll talk about that here in a second so matt maybe in the interest of time um do you want to take this slide and then i'll hop to the next i mean we could probably just roll into the platform if you want great interesting one so a lot of what we talked about right now was was drupal specific and i think um if you want to flip to the next one that'd be great um just know we're not going to focus a whole lot of time here but awkway has built out a suite of solutions that enhance drupal and then help organizations take their digital experience to the next level and so when you're migrating um we're going to talk through a few specific tools that we offer that's aqua ip that will help you migrate faster and create a better long-term delivery model and then on the right side what you're seeing here is you know if you are an agency on the line or you're leading digital strategy at your organization often if you're going from seven to nine this is the time that you're going back to your leadership and you're saying hey we're going to continue to invest in drupal it's a great platform and the question that you'll likely get back is where are we going for the next two years and these are things that you might want to consider which is um obviously content as the foundation but if you if you're looking to do more personalized campaigns if you're looking to utilize machine learning to inform that content if you need something that's maybe a little bit more robust than than media library these are all things that aquia offers to make sure that not just your migration is effective um which we certainly will help you do that in partnership with media current but your long-term experience with drupal is meeting your business goals and so in this i guess in the short term matt if i want to flip to the next slide there's three kind of primary solutions that we offer and that we would work with media current um for your teams to leverage to accelerate your migration and for you to to show you know a positive roi and getting there effectively so matt if you want to talk through aqua migrate and cloud ides real quick and then i'll cover off on site studio and these might just be tools that folks want to take a look at as they think about migrating and they can always reach out to media current or aqua to get a bit more than just kind of the high level points you'll hear now yeah sure so aqua migrate has um three main components to simplify moving to drupal 9 or even from other platforms so first is analyze till you extract your content and data look at it analyze it and optimize it before you move it to drupal 9. one the other is also then to re-platform so if you are coming we'll talk about adobe and other items but if you need to move from those platforms we have a number of pre-built configurations to make that easier and then accelerate which is coming out soon which is specifically designed to migrate from drupal 7 to drupal 9 and a lot of stuff that damien show with running scripts and all those other things we have a browser-based ui that's going to kind of streamline and make that process a little more visual to make sure you get that content migrated over quickly and easily great thanks thanks for that matt and i guess the the last solution that you may want to consider is a new um a new piece of ip that aqua had acquired in september of last year it was formerly known as cohesion it's now known as site studio and for most developers site studio is actually a provides a tremendous amount of value because you can do the work once and then you can allow some of the non-technical folks to utilize that work over and over again so let's say you build a menu or you build you create a few different layouts um you create the the design system and some of those things need to change but there's a basic structure that needs to to stay in place um it's going to allow you to do that once and then go back to focusing on the higher value development work that you might want to do whether that's integration work or writing custom code or evaluating new modules and how it's going to enhance the the drupal experience and so even in the even in the migration phase if you're if you're rebuilding the site um and putting new content in the site those are things that can easily be done through site studio um through this visual drag and drop interface and there are there are benefits to it above and beyond layout builder um and and often they can kind of work hand in hand depending on your use case but um if that's something that you'd like to evaluate to show the efficiency of the migration and then the efficiency of how you would deliver content on your site or your portfolio sites it's something that we've seen wide adoption when thinking about the long-term delivery model so these are just these are just tools to consider folks like media current um they're really well adapt they're well informed and they know how to utilize these tools some of them may not be right for you but um you know this is just all information for your organization or agency to figure out you know what is what is the right approach to to get to drupal 9 and run it effectively long term so i think with that we have some more time for q a we have about 10 minutes left there's a few more questions in the chat um here's one let me see uh there was a question about can you recommend tools to test d8 and d9 readiness um i think we might have covered that but matt and damian is there anything else you want to try to add there sure there's the upgrade status module for drupal 7 it looks to see if there are drupal 8 versions of the module available and that can save a little bit of time instead of the manual hunt and peck there's a drupal 8 version of that available written by led by gabor horsky and a number of others with contributions from all over the php world that can check your drupal 8 site to see if it is using any outdated or deprecated apis especially useful for checking your custom code and your custom theme and um so that's again the upgrade status module anything else matt do you want to highlight oh no that's that's the big stuff yeah great um there's another question here in the chat for an upgrade to d89 do you recommend waiting for a period of time or is it preferable to upgrade quickly i think you know my my hunch what damian and matt would say is it depends um most likely it's moved to nine but you have to look at your specific scenario and he talked about the modules and any custom code and things of that nature but that's also why you know we did bring obviously damian has some great expertise here but bring media current because often we recommend talking to a partner like media current to understand your situation understand some of the nuances of where you're trying to go and if it makes sense to go right away or if it makes sense to to to stay where you are on eight so um damian or matt or anything that you'd want to add to that i don't yeah i mean i think i think you hit a lot of it i think it it definitely does depend um especially on anything else that you have in your your code base or kind of how complex things are great so generally in our experience once you have the country modules and dependencies ready that it works seamlessly at that point and we've done a few and they've worked out well so give it a try honestly use upgrade status to check to see when all of your dependencies are ready and then just try it out and do some regression testing and i think you'll be surprised at how well it works um another question we have here if a site is still on d9 and performing well is there any reason to upgrade that d8 before nine or should we focus on going straight from seven to nine so again it goes back to uh looking at the availability of the contrib pieces that you want to see if they're ready and available for nine yet and you can always build it in d8 you're not going to lose anything you'll just have one more effectively a the equivalent work of a minor upgrade to get to 9 versus the drupal 8 that you're using so give it a try so the only other thing i might mention there damian i guess this goes back to something that i said earlier which is the vast majority of modules are available for d9 that are widely used and adopted so i think that might be the default is to say hey we're gonna move to nine the plan is to get to nine unless we find something in our research but theoretically most of our customers that we've worked with have seen an easy path to go straight tonight that's the first thing the second thing is um there is gonna be a time period where the innovation is gonna focus solely on nine so there's still some i think there's still a little bit of innovation that's on eight but the focus now is online the community is focused on nine and so in order for you to be able to you know utilize that innovation you want to be on the latest version so that that's the other benefit of going to nine as quickly um as you can anything else you'd want to add damien or matt no that covers it great um there's a question here about themes um and i think it there's actually two i think there was one that was uh something about a recommended theme do you have a recommended theme and then there's another one that says any specific backend standard theme available i use claro but seems to be experimental so for the second point there is effort to get claro into core and it's actually in core but it has not been made the default admin theme yet and so work is continuing to polish that off and the hope is to get it ready and be able to make it stay or the the default admin theme possibly by 9.1.0 in december but that's the direction that core is moving to replace the existing seven admin theme with claro for a general base theme to use for front end it or for the the visitor side it really depends upon your specific needs there are a wide variety of good stable themes available to use as a base theme if that is the direction you want to go where you're given a lot of front-end apis so to speak so it resets css so all of the css is going to appear the same on all browsers um and then be able to use different libraries and things some have moved towards working with for example the bootstrap library some have moved to other libraries some are very bare bones and are designed for you to build up to completely customize it yourself or maybe you just want something simple that you just tweak some colors on there are still a number of themes that are more cookie cutter that you can start off with and just tweak a little bit to get a lot of progress so kind of give direct recommendations but there are a lot of good ones to try and recommend trying some and see what works for you great thank you damian um another question i'm seeing here is looking beyond the initial release of d9 are there any new feature features that are planned for the for the future of d9 so what what's next for d9 after the one so 9.0.0 was the throughout all of the deprecated apis and then 9.1.0 is the first release moving forward that will start adding more features again like i mentioned there's effort to finish the claro theme there's work on a new front-end theme called oliveira and that is ongoing i don't know when it'll be finished but there's a major effort to get that finished there's also work to improve the library that the media library system but in general dries provided a at least his preference for the roadmap in his dreas note at drupalcon and has shared a summary of that and an extract of the video on his website that you can take a look at and get an idea for the direction he would like to take great um the next question is probably for matt and i what work is typically being done in house and what work is being done by agency partners um i guess it is inaqueous experience um so i think what we're seeing is there are there is a subset of customers who who um who do this on their own but i would say the vast majority of our customers um you know their devs and their i.t leaders they're managing multiple technologies and multiple stacks and and with a migration especially from seven to nine there is a need for expertise and there is a need to rely on someone in some capacity that has done this multiple times over the course of you know different versions of drupal and so that's why partners like media current are really valuable because they're super flexible in terms of how they can engage with our with our customers the folks who are using drupal's technology cloud technology to run their drupal sites um so you know that that would be my recommendation is do an assessment um but it never hurts to have a call with a partner like media current or a partner that you know who has great drupal domain expertise and can help you not just with the migration but the long-term vision of where you're trying to go especially if you're on seven so it's a mix it's always a mix but um the vast majority are us who are on seven are looking to partners um and folks who have done this multiple times just to kind of validate their approach and get additional insight that they might not have so it looks like stephanie we are almost at time here i want to be mindful of that and respectful of everyone's time um did you have any closing remarks or thoughts um before we before we depart yes um so obviously thank you to jessie damien matt and ryan yourself for participating and thank you all for our attendees the active participation was awesome so we really appreciate that

Channel: Mediacurrent

Views: 461

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: drupal, migration, drupal 9, open source, drupal upgrade, drupal migration

Id: a3MOdOU5yEM

Length: 55min 43sec (3343 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020