How to Prepare Your TEAM for a Drupal Migration

As the 12-month countdown for Drupal 7 end of life nears, we’re seeing more and more articles, presentations, and blog posts (a few have even appeared on this site) concerning how to prepare your site for a Drupal migration. This is, of course, important information, as the right prep work can significantly streamline and fast track migration to the most up-to-date version of Drupal. 

What no one seems to be talking about though, is how to prepare your team for migrating a website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. 

There are essential differences between Drupal 7 and subsequent versions. Understanding these key distinctions is the first step in optimizing the migration opportunity and moving forward with the right perspective. 

As Drupal Training Program Manager for Promet Source, I have a sharp focus helping individuals and teams to understand what’s new and what’s yesterday’s news relative to their Drupal sites. Here are four fundamental factors serve to clarify key differences and power forward momentum.

1. Know the capabilities of Layout Builder for on-page flexibility. 

Layout Builder was incorporated into core, starting with Drupal 8. Many Drupal 7 sites have the Paragraphs module in place to achieve similar functionality. As sites are migrated, content editors and developers need to be trained on the capabilities Layout Builder, and ideally Provus, for flexibility in updating pages and revising layouts. 

2. Understand Twig.

Introduced with Drupal 8 as a replacement for TPL template files, Twig is the templating engine for content types in Drupal. Twig represents a completely different html template structure, and anyone who is migrating a website from Drupal 7, including front-end developers and themers, needs to know how to work within Twig. 

3. Learn about object-oriented programming. 

Differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 10 go deeper than code. Drupal 9 and 10 leverage object-oriented programming, which amounts to an inherently different structure than Drupal 7. Knowledge of object-oriented PHP is required for creating custom functionality within the architecture of a Drupal module. 

Object oriented programming or object oriented PHP categorizes and organizes code for related classes of objects into reusable blocks that can be reused. It’s an approach that’s designed to create an organizational framework for managing complexities. 

4. Learn about enhancements to content editing in Drupal 10 with the upgrade to CKEditor 5.

CKEditor is a feature-rich JavaScript text editor. As websites migrate to Drupal 10, the CKEditor 4 module will need to be upgraded to the CKEditor 5. Significant differences between the architectures of CKEditor 4 and 5 will have a big impact on the upgrade path. 

CKEditor 4 leverages the browser to a large degree. As a result, even tiny differences in behavior across browsers in low-level APIs can have a negative impact. To help ensure consistency and reliability, while enabling WYSIWYG editing for rich text fields, CKEditor 5 avoids using the browser for many low-level operations.

Next: 6 Steps to Fast Track Drupal Migration 

At Promet Source, we understand that your organization’s website tells your story and that no two are alike. With training woven into the fiber of who we are and how we engage with clients, we offer a full slate of Drupal training that ensures sharpened perspectives for individuals and teams who are considering migration to the latest version of Drupal. 

See Promet's Drupal Training Lineup

Questions concerning migrating your site to Drupal 10? Contact us today.