Migration from Drupal 7: Problems and Concerns

A series of blog posts by Electric Citizen deals with the problems and processes associated with Drupal migration. The articles discuss the pain points associated with completely rebuilding a Drupal 7 site.

The articles highlight the release of Drupal 10 and the community's efforts to address the need for complete rebuilds with each major release. Clients who have migrated to Drupal 8 and 9 are well-positioned to transition to Drupal 10 with minimal cost, thanks to the common underlying framework.

However, the posts acknowledge that migrating from Drupal 7 to any platform, whether open-source or proprietary, is a challenging process. It involves moving from an antiquated procedural code system to a modern, object-oriented framework. It requires significant time and cost, especially for highly customized websites. The migration may involve rebuilding themes, migrating content, and learning new technologies such as Twig, Composer, and Symfony.

The first article in the series advises that upgrading to a newer release of Drupal allows the learning process to start immediately, whether with the assistance of an external vendor or in-house developers.

The subsequent posts in the series compare Drupal 7 with the latest versions. The posts also assess the complexity of the migration process and other topics like outsourcing. Click here to read the blog post.