Upgrading a website script version is one of the most complicated task a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Drupal 7 upgrade guide? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : What the heck is this Drupal thing anyway? OK, so my best understanding of this is that it’s a little software package. It’s written in a language called PHP. It’s made up of core modules which you can download from http://drupal.org/project/drupal, and a bunch of optional (or “contributed”) modules, which you can surf at http://drupal.org/project/modules. All of this then sits around in a little set of folders.
The very first thing you should do is to make a local version of the website. This is an essential step because making changes to a live website is very risky and is never a recommended practice. This way, if anything does go awry, your actual website will remain safe and functional. When done with the installation of the modules, you will have to navigate to the upgrade path. For this, go to www.yoursite.com/upgrade (remember to replace yoursite with the name of your Drupal 8 website). You will be brought to the following screen. Please make sure you follow the directions on the screen before proceeding.
If you’re new to the Migrate API, start from the beginning and get an overview of how the system works and how all the pieces fit together. This is essential background information for anyone wanting to migrate data into Drupal. Additionally, part of performing any migration is planning and preparation. Migrations involve preparing and analyzing your source data, building a new website that data can be migrated into, and lots of testing, rolling back, and testing again, in order to get everything right.
Here are basic steps to take to upgrade an existing Drupal site to use a distribution. These are rough guidelines only. Because each site and each distribution is configured differently, you’re likely to run into additional complexities. But these notes should at least get you started in the right direction. Select a distribution to use. You’ll want to find the distribution that most closely matches your site requirements. See the listings and comparisons of Drupal distributions on drupal.org.
The steps above outline how to get a distribution minimally installed on an existing site. But you’ll still have a lot of work to do to reconcile your existing site content and structure with what has been created by the distribution. Here are a few tips to get you started–but you should begin with the assumption that there will be lots more you’ll discover and need to fix. If the distribution is installed from scratch, we can be sure that the components we’re creating won’t conflict with existing components on the site. But when we’re converting an existing site into a one based on a distribution, there’s the potential that a component we’re creating will have the same name as one that already exists on the site. In certain cases, such a conflict can cause a site error that’s difficult to resolve. See more details on Upgrading from Drupal 7.