Few days ago I decided that I will revamp this blog to latest version of Drupal which is version 8. To be honest I was not sure about D8 but more about improving the site. Actually for the past 2-3 years I didn't improve this site. This is the thing with website development. You need to keep on improving it, maintain it and make sure it is running fine. There are many things which I changed on the site and I want to summarise here.
Upgraded to D8.
The first thing I did was to install fresh D8 and then I migrated the data from D7. D8 comes with some experimental migration modules - Migrate, Migrate Drupal and Migrate UI. I used them and migration was kind of ok. I didn't bother too much about the configurations. I just wanted the blogs and its related configuration like fields to migrate. It worked well and I was happy. Few things like views, image styles were not migrated and I didn't bother to research into it. All well.
Using Bootstrap
The old D7 site was using Omega 4, which I loved and I still like it. I initially decided to use Omega 5 but one of the major concern was to keep it constantly updated with small changes every now and then. Using Omega means that I would need to setup compiler for SAAS on local and use Git to push the changes to the server. I wanted quick and simple way. I would still use Git in near future but I still wanted this ability to modify things quickly. So I decided to go for Bootstrap CDN subtheme. I like its out of the box responsive nature and for a simple design I think it is great. I used almost the same style as old site and the same color scheme. I used the base color #330000 which I love for some reason :)
Configuring basic stuff
I configured the basic modules like metatags, xmlsitemap, token and pathologic. They are quite important from my experience. The most important thing for me is SEO.
Moving this site to webfaction
This site was running amazingly well on linode for many years. Since D8 requires PHP 7 and new version of MySQL and I was feeling lazy to update them on linode as it also hosts some of my other important site so I thought of hosting the site on webfaction which is very convenient. So far things are fine.
I am quite excited to get my hands dirty on Drupal after a long gap and initially I was little nervous as D8 is much different from D7 in some ways but at the core of it I still feel at home.
Total time spent: 3 days (most of the time was spent in installing Drush)
Physical state: Tired and neck pain
Love you Drupal :*
UPDATE (after 1 hour): Just enabled comments on the site. Also enabled Honeypot module to prevent spamming. Lets see how it goes. Enabling the comments after a long time. I hope I enjoy it.
