Happy birthday to “the big eight” & some reasons to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8
Everyone would like to have a perfectly working, well-protected website with all the features they fancy — and you know it’s our mission at Drudesk support to provide this!
A year ago, we got a big task within this mission — to help Drupal 6 website owners upgrade to newer CMF versions. On November 19, 2015, the long-expected, fresh and shiny Drupal 8 came out, and three months later Drupal 6 officially became unsupported and stopped getting any security or other updates. Today, we are ready to wish Drupal 8 a happy birthday and, together with our wishes, to show you some reasons to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8.
So upgrade to Drupal 8 or maybe to Drupal 7? A glimpse at the dilemma
Logically, website upgrades rapidly jumped in demand and popularity. Drupal 6 site owners are interested in migrating to either Drupal 8 or to Drupal 7. Both are good solutions, the choice depends on the complexity and nature of the website.
If it’s a simple website, there is nothing to think about, just choose Drupal 8 — probably the upgrade process will not take much time. The more complex your site is, the more contributed and custom modules it has, or, in some cases, the less accurately it was created by the developers, the more lengthy the upgrade might be. The expenses should also be weighed against the value Drupal 8 has to offer in your case, and how important its innovations might be for your site.
There is no one solution for everyone, so we help our customers make their own.
However, talking about preferences generally, we can say Drupal 8 has time on its side. More modules are completely ready to use and the release is getting more mature. So today, to honor the “birthday celebrant,” we are going to emphasize some benefits of this choice.
Arguments in favor of migrating to Drupal 8
Consider Drupal 8’s brilliant enhancements
The new release truly impressed the world with its innovative features, and it was actually rebuilt from the ground up. It’s the future! You could step forward and never look back.
Imagine that you have received a parcel with your new purchase. You unwrap it with in anticipation and examine these (and many other) gifts one by one:
- Responsiveness and mobile-friendliness
- Extensive support for web accessibility standards
- Fast and easy configuration management in files
- Amazing multilingual opportunities
- Better content management, including inline editing
- Built-in web services
- Object-oriented code
- Fast and flexible theming with Twig
- Improved markup with HTML5 support
- The most popular Views module now in core
Drupal 8 is getting the most attention — take advantage of this!
The community is now focused on working with Drupal 8, polishing it to perfection, implementing new excellent initiatives that offer a new way of doing things. Besides, judging from the reaction to Drupal 6 after Drupal 7 appeared, there will be less work being done on Drupal 7. Some module maintainers are likely to shift their focus to Drupal 8, which means that Drupal 7 module updates may not all always be done as fast as you might like.
Someday Drupal 9 will come
Of course, Drupal 7 remains solid, and there is an end-of-life in sight for it. It is going to be supported for a long time. But some day (it’s too early to make even a rough forecast), Drupal 9 will appear and Drupal 6’s story will be repeated for Drupal 7. So why not think a couple steps ahead?
Make up your mind, go ahead, and upgrade! Whatever your choice is — to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 or to Drupal 7 — Drudesk support service will support you. We are ready to take care of your upgrade process from A to Z, from helping you make your choice to implementing it.
We wish you to be up-to-date, stay protected and enjoy innovations!