As a website development and full-service creative agency with 25 years of experience, we know a thing or two about Drupal. Over the past decade, our developers have created hundreds of websites on Drupal. Everyone who currently uses Drupal 8 as their CMS will need to upgrade to Drupal 9 by November 2021 to maintain security support.
We surveyed 13 of our Drupal developers, who have over 120 years of collective development experience, about all things Drupal. The best part? We’re sharing all their insightful responses with you in a series of blogs, so make sure you follow along.
In this blog post, our developers dive into what will be the top 3 challenges for websites migrating from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.
1. Deprecated Code and Incompatible Modules
Many sites – especially more recent sites – have minimal deprecated code. However, some sites rely on lots of deprecated code paths and will require significant developer time to achieve full compatibility with Drupal 9. In the vast majority of cases, contrib modules are already Drupal 9 compatible, but in some cases, lower usage contrib modules may need updating. Depending on the scenario, upgrading the code could take a lot of time.
2. People think it won’t be a challenge and won’t plan ahead for the migration.
It is true it won’t be a challenge in many cases, but to ensure it doesn’t become a challenge, it is vital to plan ahead. Planning for the migration from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and having a team of Drupal experts is key for the upgrade to go as smoothly as possible.
3. Feature Porting
You just need to force yourself (and your code) to move away from deprecated libraries and functions that will eventually be removed, so this can be a challenge depending on your website’s code.
Whether or not you think legacy code is a concern for your project, Drupal 8 end-of-life date is November 2, 2021. Of course, your site is not going to self-destruct, but there are certainly security implications. Just like tax season, upgrade season is upon us. But Drupal 9 has been out long enough to instill confidence – now is the best possible time to get the ball rolling.
Reach out, and we can do an assessment of your website to see what it would take to upgrade.
Oh, and our team will be presenting at DrupalCon 2021, so make sure you check out the sessions. Rolando Scott, director of Drupal development, Scott Spector, director of accessibility and quality, and Kennedy Bahlow, event producer, all will be presenting.
