janezurevc.name runs on Drupal 8!

Drupal 8 was officially released last November. Since then I was planning to try migrating my blog from previous version of this great CMS. Drupal 8 comes with many improvements and I definitely wanted to leverage those also on my site.

Besides that I always used my personal site also as an experimental sandbox where I tested new Drupal modules, themes, technologies. Even if I am very active contributor to Drupal core and contributed modules and I've been working on an enterprise Drupal 8 project at my work I actually never migrated a site to Drupal 8 to this date. It was definitely something I wanted to try.

Previous version of janezurevc.name was running on Drupal 7. It is important to note migration from 7 to 8 isn't officially supported yet. Drupal 7 won't reach EOL for at least few more years, which makes this migration not critical. However, migrations from Drupal 6 have been fully supported since the day 8 was release. 6 will reach EOL this month, which makes migration from 6 to 8 an absolute priority.

Migration

My site is actually very basic. I am using content (2 content types), taxonomy (1 vocabulary), few contributed modules and that is really it. It turns out that every that I needed migrates reliably.

I started the process by reading official documentation. Besides Migrate and Migrate Drupal modules that come with core I needed few contributed modules. Drupal upgrade, Migrate tools and Migrate plus.

Migration itself was extremely easy. I installed Drupal 8 site, enabled migrate modules, started migration and waited for a few minutes. That's it! At least for core stuff. There are some glitches when it comes to contributed modules, but even that was fairly easy to resolve.

I can just thank to everyone that contributed to Migrate in Drupal core. You did an awesome job!

Theme

Drupal 7 version of my blog used Sky theme, which is unfortunately not ported to 8 yet. For that reason I needed to search theme repository and came across Bootstrap clean blog.

It looked nice and it had a Drupal 8 -dev release. Regardless of that it works as a charm. I even contributed minor patches and am planning to contribute few more.

How do you like the theme?

Modules

Like almost every Drupal website out there mine also uses few contributed modules. Let's see how that went.

Disqus

Disqus module has been ported as part of the Google summer of code project, which I've mentored in 2014. Module itself works very well. We changed architecture a bit; instead of having a custom database table we rather used a dedicated field type. This approach comes with many benefits. By doing this we're not limited to nodes any more. Disqus can be used on any entity type now.

Even if the port was there migration was not. I used this opportunity to dig into this part of Drupal a bit more. I wrote 7 to 8 migration support for everything Disqus needs. This includes general configuration, fields on entities, statuses and identifiers. My code is already committed and you can give it a try.

Did you try Disqus migration? Let me know how did it work for you.

Pathauto and Redirect

D8 ports are available on their Drupal.org project pages. They work as a charm. While core migrates existing aliases alias patterns, redirects and other configuration aren't supported yet. I had just 3 alias patterns and less than 10 redirects on my old site so this wasn't hard to fix manually.

If you meet @Berdir please buy him a beer. He did an awesome job porting this (any many other) modules.

Media

I was using media to embed images in WYSIWYG, which is using legacy embed token in Drupal 7. This part was unfortunately not ported yet. I was using this on lees than 10 places so I decided to fix this manually too. I used a simple SQL query to get node IDs of content that used legacy token. Then I simply changed it to standard tag with data-entity-* attributes, which Drupal 8 uses for it's own image embeds.

Markdown filter

Recently I found out that I prefer Markdown when producing written content. It doesn't interfere my writing flow nearly as much as WYSIWYG editors do. When using Markdown I focus on content instead of the appearance (for the same reason I really liked LaTeX during my university years).

Guess what? There is a module for that! Markdown filter comes with a text filter that will convert Markdown syntax to HTML when displaying it. And it also has a Drupal 8 port. Download, install, configure, use. It was as easy as that!

How does Markdown work for you? Do you prefer it over WYSIWYG editor as much as I do?

Other modules

I use few other modules on the page. All of them have some kind of Drupal 8 release:

All of them work without any problem. I downloaded, installed and configured them. Google analytics even comes with support for migration (which meant 3rd step was not needed).

Great work maintainers and contributors!

Other interesting stuff

I also used this migration to move my blog to a new hosting solution. Old blog was hosted on a VPS that I used in the past and am slowly moving away from it. Most of my sites and services are currently hosted on a dedicated server at Hetzner (they provide excellent value for a price so I'd definitely recommend them).

Recently I started using Docker for my development environments and I wanted to try it in production too (I mentioned I am (ab)using my personal site for experimenting, right? :)). As a result of that I'm hosting janezurevc.name in a Dockerized environment managed via Docker compose. Compose is super nice as it allows you to describe your infrastructure stack in a single YAML file. This allows you to commit it to a VCS repository and replicate infrastructure anywhere you want. But this is already a topic for some of my future posts.

Did you try to migrate your Drupal 6 or 7 sites to 8? How did it go? Which contributed modules are you using?

slashrsm
Mon, 08.02.2016 - 07:30