Tag: Drupal

I have resisted migrating this site to Drupal 8 for years. Every time I looked into it there was some killer feature that D8 couldn’t do. The times I attempted testing out the process it was always a complete disaster. Well, time is running out on Drupal 7. The old system is slated for end-of-life in 2020 and it’s now or never for the “upgrade.”

In this post I am going to recap my experience in migrating a fairly simple Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8. Hopefully, someone facing the same issues as me will come across this post and will find something helpful.

Long story short, the migration process sucks bad. If you don’t have a little experience with directly manipulating a database or troubleshooting software in general, don’t even attempt it.

I am not a command-line guy. This was going to be a drush-free migration.The whole push in Web development towards command-line apps for everything has been one of the worst things to happen to the Internet. It is virtually impossible for a beginner to just jump in and start creating content. Developers have made huge strides in interface usability and yet the tools to create those interfaces are nightmares of horrible UI design puzzle-boxes that exist mostly as job security for entrenched Web devs. Thank Shatner for the few out there like Prepros.io who are at least trying to make new technologies user friendly.

The first hurdle for me was finding a decent local development environment that could handle Drupal 8. My old standby, Xampp, has become garbage in recent versions with no 64-bit support and no interface improvements. I found Wampserver64 and it has turned out to be fantastic. Most importantly, it allows me to run two different local domains, which is required as the migration process works by sucking an old site into a new one rather than overwriting an exiting Drupal 7 install.

After setting up a clean Drupal 8 install with all the migration modules installed I set about creating a plan of attack. Oh, as an aside, whatever you do, do not install the Migration Example modules. It will fill your new site with a bunch of garbage content and fields that don’t get removed when you uninstall the module. My first order of business was to determine which I my D7 modules had D8 versions. A spreadsheet and lots of notes proved helpful. I tried to limit only the most integral modules and skip any ones that are just cosmetic. A lot of popular modules have been added into the core, but in many case they are watered down versions (Menu Block stands out as particularly bad).

Migration Begins

At that point I clicked all the buttons, watched and waited. It looked like most of the content came over but there are big problems with text-filters. If they don’t match with the new D8 filters, the content won’t render. That is really dumb. I had to log in too phpMyAdmin to manually change values. The next big problem was that my post were peppered with strange characters. This had to do with my Sql server not having correct character encoding. This article explains the fix you should do before migrating (I had to search and replace for hours because I failed to do this). Basically, add the following to mysql.ini:

[client]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

[mysqld]
character_set_server=utf8mb4
collation_server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Comments

The next big problem were comments. Only the most recent comments were rendering and I couldn’t see any difference between those and the bad ones. There appeared to be two tables for comments in the database: comment_field_data and comment__comment_body. Turns out if the langcode column doesn’t match between these two tables, the comments don’t render. More stupidity. Had to manually add “en” to the fields. Thankfully this site doesn’t have that many comments.

Page Caching and Dev Environment

The next step was setting up the local.settings.php to disable caching and render theming helper code. A couple YouTube videos explained this pretty well, although I still am having to flush the cache to see changes half the time.

Views, Oh God Views

Views is a fantastic module. It’s the reason we all use Drupal in the first place. So, why the holy hell aren’t views migrated by default?! So freaking annoying! I had to recreate about 15 custom views manually in order to get many of the site features back. Don’t delete that Drupal 7 site yet. You will definitely need it for reference.

Turning on the Modules

I then started installing and enabling various modules. Like I said earlier, things are different here in Drupal 8. Menu_Block is missing features, Menu_Position is just plain broken (a fix is in the works), Redirect is flaky and throws errors.

Everything to do with CKEditor is horrible. TinyMCE was orders of magnitude better. More robust, more advanced features, better looking, better integration with Drupal… sigh. I have a feeling I am going to be using code view a lot with CKEditor.

Pages of Fun Theme Redux

If there is one area where Drupal 8 is leaps and bounds better than D7 it’s the new Twig-based theming system. The syntax is far less cryptic. A simple {{ content.field_myfield }} renders a field. Perfect. My theme is far simpler than before, yet looks pretty good. Lots of fancy CSS layout tricks here that probably fail in Internet Explorer.

Launching the Site

So, after about two weeks of poking at it, I finally launched the site on December 19th. Within about 30 minutes I got my first spam comment. I do miss Mollum. I’ve tracked down a few anti-spam modules, but it’s going to be tough. I gave up on comments on the Nonagon.us site long ago and this may be a losing battle. Out of my cold dead hands Russian bot farms!

And here we are, a couple days in and things seem to me working okay. I’m sure I will need to upload fixes very soon. There are always sections of the site I miss. And when my first round of analytic come in I may need to start hunting down broken links. In the meantime, click around and enjoy. (And buy my art!)

I’ve been having some technincal issues with this site lately. Strange links to content within the site have been appearing at random. I would insert a hyperlink to an archived post and then, days later, I would come back to see that the URL has been rewritten with a random sub-domain prefix. My domain would appear as www.wqw.robertgomez.org or similar.

I am not entirely sure what was going on but I think bots and the Drupal Pathologic module are to blame. Pathologic is a great module that will convert any internal site link into a standardized absolute URL. In my code I would create a link with an href of “node/1098” and Pathologic would convert that href to “http://www.robertgomez.org/blog/2014/03/17/drupal-my-list-essential-modules”. However, I suspect that when various bots crawled my site they used weird sub-domain prefixes in hopes of doing… I don’t know what?! Occasionally, one of these bots must have triggered a cron job, and my links were rewritten with the phony sub-domain. Seems feasible, right? If there is a real reason why this was happening, let me know in the comments.

The bad links could be fixed by opening a node and re-saving them. I used the Resave Nodes module to bulk save everything again. However, by the next morning the bad links had returned. The phony sub-domains were still being crawled. The next step was to use a rewrite rule in my .htaccess file that would force all subdomain traffic to a non “www” prefixed URL of the site. I then re-resaved everything, an so far thing are back to normal. Again, if you know what’s going on, shoot me a comment.

Taking a break from my usual and completely unnecessary review posts, I thought I’d take a moment get a little technical. This site and many others I have developed use the Drupal open-sourced content management system. Drupal is great. It’s incredibly flexible, powerful and yet moderately easy to use if you have a little Web design experience.

Other systems I have used in the past, including Microsoft Sharepoint and WordPress, don’t hold a candle to Drupal. Sharepoint is an abomination and the only reason you should ever use it for a public facing Web site is if you work at Megacorp, Inc. and some idiot I.T. guy bought it as part of a multi-million dollar corporate enterprise package. Customizing Sharepoint is an exercise in futility and self-immolation. Just assume that your clean standards-compliant code with get destroyed and converted into a stew of redundant tags and impossible-to-style markup. WordPress is much better than that but it still falls short of Drupal when it comes to customizing your content types and controlling look and feel. You can hardly do anything custom in WordPress without having to hand code PHP. Simple tasks like adding an extra field to a post-type are just a pain and require some sort of third-party plugin (of which there are many and all of them do it differently). The only area where WordPress is better than Drupal is in installing and updating plugins and core systems. Drupal is getting better at this, but it still has a way to go to match the ease of use that WordPress offers.

For all my Drupal love, it still isn’t perfect right out of the box. Any Drupal install is going to require also installing a number of add-on modules to get your site fully reach its potential. So here is a list of the modules that I will include in every Drupal site that I create.

Views

Views is the reason you are using Drupal. It allows you to build custom pages, feeds, blocks, etc. based on specific database queries. There is nothing like this for WordPress. You want a page of only posts created in June with the word summer in the body? A list of recent comments? A slideshow of art from posts tagged NSFW? Boom, Views can do that and sort it, make it filterable, restrict access… almost anything you can think of. Views puts you in control of your database. Installing views in Drupal 7 also requires the Chaos Tools Suite, so consider that an essential module too.

Administration Menu

This module puts a thin flyout-menu at the top of all pages that will quickly allow editors and admins to perform tasks without having to click down through multiple pages of admin content. The default Drupal 7 toolbar plus shortcuts is pretty close to providing this functionality but Admin Menu just does it so much better.

Module Filter

Module Filter is like Admin Menu in that it takes a core system interface and makes it just a bit more user friendly. In this case it tames the often over-long list of add on modules. During the development stage of any Drupal site, this saves you a ton of time scrolling and searching that page.

Backup and Migrate

This module has saved me many-a-time. It provides a way to backup your site’s data via a simple Web interface. You can also set schedules for daily backups and you automatically backup to the cloud if you so desire. It is also the easy way to get a site from a test environment to the live server.

Wysiwyg

The main thing that turned me off about Drupal when I first started using it was the lack of any sort of visual text editor when creating content. You still needed to know HTML to style anything. This problem is easily solved with the Wysiwyg module and another third-party visual editing library (in my case I use TinyMCE). The need for a library kinda makes this module a pain to install, but, once you get it up and running, composing posts becomes much easier especially for non-technical users.

IMCE

IMCE also fulfills a very basic editing need that the Drupal core lacks. It allows users to upload and embed images into the body area of their posts via a pop-up file browser. It integrates smoothly into your visual Wysiwyg editor by also installing the IMCE Wysiwyg bridge module.

Read More Control

A final basic Web design flaw with the Drupal core is that it places a truncated post’s Read More link way below where a user might actually notice it. Read More Control brings it back where it should be, within the text of the post’s teaser content.

Menu Block

The default main menu of Drupal is okay, but it is limited in that doesn’t easily let you create CSS flyouts or create sub menus in the sidebar as you dig deeper into the site. Menu block provides you with a highly customizable way to display menus whereever you want.

Pathauto

Pathauto is one of those modules (like views) that really just needs to be part of the core. It gives developers a way to create custom URL aliases based on all sorts of variables (using Tokens… see below). I typically use it to fake an organized directory structure to my sites. And, unlike WordPress’s path customization, it can be as general or specific as you like and doesn’t need to be based on dates or content IDs. 

Menu Position

This module is the second half of my strategy to get my sites to follow a psuedo-directory structure. It allows you to create rules that will make a particular set of content nodes appear as though they exist within a menu structure without having to individually assign each item to the menu tree.

Token

Token is a behind the scenes module that provides a way for Drupal and other modules to use simple placeholders to output small bits of text like post titles, fields, tags, dates, etc.

Honorable Mentions

There are a few more modules which I install most of the time but are not really essential in the way I believe the proceeding are. These include: Date, Field Group, Captcha, Webform, Colorbox, Entity and Libraries. Follow the links for more information.