Updating older Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 8
The Permaculture Association is a charity promoting the theory and practice of permaculture.
At the time of writing, we'd been supporting the Association for six years. In fact, ever since their (then) web manager, Debbie Jones, attended the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG) looking for help. She got some free support from our senior developer Chris Maiden. This was back when he worked for a Drupal company - Menus & Blocks - that ultimately folded into Code Enigma.
We inherited Permaculture and Debbie’s heroic efforts. They wanted to build and maintain various Drupal sites on a tight budget. As a grassroots organisation without big reserves, the best way to help was to provide training and developer support to Debbie.
Permaculture approached us asking for advice on how to upgrade their website from Drupal 6 in time for the imminent arrival of Drupal 8. It was immediately obvious that a professional upgrade to the site would be expensive.
Permaculture didn’t have money to throw at web development. But they could build a content-rich website with a lot of transactional features.
Despite tight budgets, many community-based organisations still have complex online communication requirements.
What we did and outcomes
We created a simple Drupal site that can act as a sign-posting site to the old site. This meant Permaculture kept its content on the old site with links back to it from the new site.
They could move content across from old to new site piece by piece, as and when.
This isn’t a perfect solution. But it’s a great example of a principle that holds for many development projects: do the simplest thing that works.
We approached Code Enigma for advice about how to upgrade our website from Drupal 6, in face of the imminent arrival of Drupal 8. It was immediately obvious that a professional upgrade to the site would be prohibitively expensive. Although we didn’t have the money to throw at web development, what we got was a content-rich website with a lot of transactional features.
Nicola Bell - Website Coordinator
