Hundreds of academic libraries use Drupal to organize and display content on the web - but less than 40% of sites using Drupal have upgraded to D8 (according to Drupal.org usage statistics), and support for D7 is ending in less than 2 years. This poster will walk you through the process of upgrading your Drupal 6 or 7 site to Drupal 8, drawing on lessons learned from upgrading NC State University Libraries’s Drupal site in 2018 and our experiences since the upgrade.
Getting from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is more of a migration than an upgrade, but we’ve found D8 to be well worth the effort. This poster will review criteria for deciding whether (and when) to migrate, benefits of Drupal 8 over Drupal 7, and how we prepared our stakeholders for the migration. Other topics covered will include Drupal’s “Migrate” and “Migrate Plus” modules, how to efficiently migrate pieces of your site that can’t utilize these modules, testing strategies for your new Drupal 8 site and how to communicate with content editors post-migration.