David Currie

For my sins, I have now been involved in the management of our orienteering club’s current website for over 10 years now. Back then, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for club officials and members to contribute content and, after evaluating WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, we went with Drupal as our Content Management System. The extensibility of Drupal makes it immensely powerful but, as with many open source projects, the rich ecosystem of contributed modules can be both a blessing and a curse.

Although the details have been long forgotten, I do remember that the move from Drupal 6 to 7 was a painful one and so, despite it being over three years since Drupal 8 was released, I was in no rush to migrate. In the end, it was a security vulnerability in one of the modules that wasn’t going to be addressed in v7 that precipitated the move.

The major changes in core Drupal have seemingly been too much for many module contributors to make the move. An initial assessment wasn’t particularly promising: of fifty-five non-core modules the current site had installed, five were no-longer needed in Drupal 8, six had GA v8 versions and a further fourteen had beta versions available. A migration estimate site put the effort involved at several weeks worth and, in the end, it probably wasn’t far off!

My first task was to slim down the number of modules installed. Many weren’t actively in use any more (e.g. content_access and views_data_export) and others had simple replacements which had easier migration paths (e.g. swapping out timefield for a simple text field). Ironically, the module with the security flaw was one of those that I disabled but, having started down this path, I was determined to complete a migration.

It was then time to start the actual migration. Thankfully the process now involves setting up a parallel site as it would still be weeks before I had anything that was approaching usable. One of the issues was that no private file path was set up during the migration. Another, that the migrated text formats were using a handler that no longer existed. Opening and resaving them fixed that problem. Another of the random error messages required manually modifying the database to remove the upload field from entity.definitions.bundle_field_map in the drup_key_value table (go figure).

The site makes extensive use of custom content types and views which are finally a part of core Drupal. Views are not part of the default migration though, and, in the end, I just recreated them manually. The same was true of all the patterns for pathauto.

At this point, with the styling also re-introduced, the site was ready to go live again but there were still problems waiting to be found. One was that, what used to appear as a date field, now appeared as a datetime field in forms. In the end, I decided to test out the new REST capabilities to export the contents of the field and reimport into a new field with the correct type. The only catch here was that there is no querying capability in the REST API so it was necessary to create a JSON-rendered view that listed the required nodes in order to retrieve their ids so that they could then be processed one-by-one. The rest was just a short bash script using curl and jq.

Hopefully, the migration can now be considered complete. The site now uses relatively few custom modules which is, undoubtedly, a good thing for future stability. If the move to Drupal 9 looks anywhere near as painful though, I now know how to extract the entire site content so maybe it will be time to revisit the CMS landscape. It would hate to think that I’ll still be debugging PHP errors in another ten years time!