In June 2021, we ran a webinar for clients and prospects to further educate the market about the Drupal CMS upgrade process. We partnered with Acquia who has developed a migration tool to help website owners plan and execute their upgrade.
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Enjoy the highlights:
Here is the transcript of this video highlight:
"This webinar today is on how you can ignite and accelerate your Drupal 7 into Drupal 9 migration. Let's quickly meet our speakers today. We have Liza and Sylvain from Cyber-Duck and Dave from Acquia. Now I will pass on to Sylvain who will be doing our First presentation today.
SYLVAIN: Let's talk about Drupal. From Drupal's own research, there's still around two thirds of websites that are using Drupal 7 or lower version of that CMS. And you might be wondering why should I upgrade? You've probably heard about this end of life thing, and what does it mean?
The first thing obviously is that Drupal 7 is almost 15 years old now, the way it was built back then has a lot of convoluted ways and it's an outdated framework and the end of life date that you've heard for this year for Drupal 8 and next year for Drupal 7 means that the ongoing support for the framework past that date will be very limited and will be the exception, not the norm, and you don't want to be the last one running on outdated technology. So in terms of the migration to move away from Drupal 7 as you can see, it's a lot of work, the move from 7 and 8 because of the new frameworks I mentioned, it's typically several weeks or a month of work because you need to consider the data structure, need to migrate the content and to make sure the modules are still compatible
In terms of upgrading to Drupal 9, again, the process is well-defined it's on publicly available on the Drupal website it's well documented, the process is clear. However, each cost base, each website is very different. There's lots of websites that we came across have custom modules that over the years, different agencies or developers have built, and every website is very different.
So you can imagine all of those steps can quickly become very time consuming and expensive.
ACQUIA: You probably already know that our founder and CTO is also the founder of Drupal and the project. But a lot of our employees are also heavily engaged in the community, and Acquia contributes more to Drupal than any other organisations, we're in a pretty good position to be able to talk to our customers and our partners.
We've already been through this whole process and analyzed how the time and the costs associated with Drupal 7 to Drupal, 9 migrations were distributed. This is what we found, on this next slide, you'll see, around half of the effort was effectively rebuilding the presentation and the logic and the other half was migrating data and then figuring out what can be migrated and what can't be.
So with this in mind, we developed Acquia Migrate Accelerate, which is an exclusive feature of Acquia Cloud Enterprise. It provides a set of tools to reduce the time and effort to migrate from an Acquia hosted Drupal 7 to Drupal nine by up to 80%, in some cases.
LIZA: As a project manager, working with different clients and seeing the end-to-end process.
I also see common mistakes and my role is to foresee such issues and make sure that whole team, including the client knows what needs to be done in order to avoid any issues. And one of the most common mistakes I always see is that content considers to be something not very important. Something easy to do and quite often delayed to a few weeks before the launch.
We suggest that you start with, research. You research what your users actually need and you also do a content audit and see if there is some outdated content, that you don't need to migrate.
The first thing I would say is download our ebook, if you haven't already, it's a great first step to get you understanding a bit more why Drupal 9 is so important.
As well as that Acquia have their own ultimate guide to Drupal 9 which again I believe is essential reading."
