Talking Drupal #419 - Drupal 7 EOL & Backdrop CMS

Today we are talking about Drupal 7 EOL, Backdrop CMS, and Upgrade strategy from Drupal 7 with guests Jen Lampton & Laryn Kragt Bakker. We’ll also cover Acquia Migrate: Accelerate as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/419

Topics

• When is Drupal 7 EoL
• If someone is on Drupal 7 what are their options
• If someone does not have the resources to upgrade to Drupal 10 what can they do
• Can someone stay on Drupal 7 after EoL
• What is Backdrop CMS
• Listener question - James: Some people have mentioned that Backdrop has changed significantly since forking, does this affect upgrading from drupal 7
• Listener question - James: Will there be another fork
• How can Backdrop help people get off of Drupal 7
• Tell us a bit about Backdrop’s annual online event
• Is Backdrop negatively affecting Drupal 10 adoption
• How does someone get involved with Backdrop
• What are some big features on the Backdrop roadmap

Resources

• Drupal 7 EOL
• Backdrop CMS
• How to get involved
• GitHub
• Zulip
• Flightpath CLI
• compare d7 -> d10 vs d7 -> backdrop
  • https://backdropcms.org/news/why-we-moved-two-stanford-websites-to-backdrop-cms
  • https://atendesigngroup.com/articles/making-case-drupal-7-backdrop-cms-upgrade
• Drupal 7 soft landing

Guests

Laryn Kragt Bakker - atendesigngroup.com - laryn

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Jen Lampton - jenlampton.com - jenlampton

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Acquia Migrate: Accelerate

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to add a layer of automation to Drupal’s migrate API, to simplify the process of migrating content and site architecture from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9? There’s a module for that.
• Brief history
  • How old: created in July 2020 by Aaron Winborn-award winner webchick
• Versions available:
  • 1.8.0 release which works with Drupal 9
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained - latest release, its first as open source, was in the last week
• Number of open issues:
  • 3 issues, none of which are bugs, and all labeled as fixed
• Usage stats:
  • None, officially
• Maintainer(s):
  • Current release by Wim Leers, a longtime Drupal contributor and core subsystem maintainer
• Module features and usage
  • The goal of Migrate Accelerate is to make Drupal core’s migrate API something that can be used by less technical users to migrate a Drupal 7 site to a modern version of Drupal
  • Relies on an Acquia CLI command to analyze your Drupal 7 site, so it can generate a composer.json file using an existing matrix of hundreds mappings from legacy modules to modern Drupal equivalents, including patches
  • That composer file becomes the basis for your migrated site, into which it will begin to migrate your content architecture
  • It provides a dashboard that lists out the various kinds of content found on the origin site, with an ability to control the order in which the migrations will be performed
  • At any point it’s possible to see a live preview the content that’s been migrated, within the same UI
  • There’s also a drush command to trigger the same process, which actually runs more efficiently but still allows for live preview
  • If you want to get an estimate on how much of your Drupal 7 site can be migrated automatically, there is also a Flightpath report you can generate (using a drush command) which is an HTML file that summarizes how much of your Drupal 7 site can be migrated automatically
  • Migrate Accelerate used to be available only to Acquia customers and partners, but with this new release anyone in the community can use it to help them migrate their Drupal 7 site forward