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D7 to D9 Migrations: How They Work on Acquia
As Acquia, we're passionate about Drupal - a community driven, open source Content Management System. In fact, we're so passionate, we have a dedicated team who drive a number of open source contribution initiatives in the community.
Over the past 2 years, one of those initiatives has been vetting and contributing migration paths from Drupal 7 to the (not so new anymore) architecture of Drupal 9 across the community of contributed modules. Before I talk more about what we've done here - I want to explain a little more about why we chose to invest in this type of contribution.
Drupal 7 was released in 2011, and although its 12 years old now, it still represents 50% of the Drupal market based on Drupal.org core usage statistics (at July, 2022).
Although Drupal 7 was massively successful and gained great adoption, it inherited a fundamental flaw of its predecessors: no major upgrade paths. This was addressed eventually in Drupal 8 and since, all major and minor versions of Drupal now have upgrade paths. But for Drupal 7 users, a migration path is still required.
2011-2018 was a time where:
As a result, many businesses opted to integrate heavily into their Drupal website and the Drupal community produced thousands of integration and site building modules to do the job. This monolith can make a lot of sense as you could hire a team of Drupal developers who could virtually do everything in your digital experience.
And as is the case in technology, things have changed since. Mobile devices are first-class citizens, many more businesses are SaaS powered and "embeddable" in the front end. Javascript and browser technology is much better that is was and now viable for many businesses to adopt.
Drupal too has matured and changed as well. Its natively "headless" and able to expose its structured data in open formats understood by modern frontend frameworks. Its added many new core features around content management, workflow, media, configuration management and translation making it a great candidate to migrate into.
So today we see that around 50% of the Drupal users have a Drupal 7 monolith they need to get off before the End of Life, currently scheduled for January 2025 or even before the end of PHP 7.4 . But as we've discussed, these users have a lot invested in Drupal 7. They have a lot of data they need to retain alongside the function that makes that data useful (e.g. a URL to a youtube video (data) needs to be accompanied with a video player (function)).
This is where our Drupal Acceleration Team (DAT) comes in. Our team contributed towards the Drupal 7 to 8 migration system in Drupal core (which still works in Drupal 9 and will continue to work in Drupal 10 (to be released in December 2022)). Since then, we've been working with the wider community contributed projects to vet and produce migration paths for the most used Drupal modules.
Today we have 2,400+ Drupal 7 modules with Drupal 9 compatible releases that help preserve the function that was made available in Drupal 7. To date, the Drupal Acceleration Team has vetted 22% of those D9 ready modules to ensure their migration path from Drupal 7 also preserves the data. From our own platform data, we can see a Pareto principle in action - the 22% of modules we've vetted average an 83% coverage of a Drupal 7 site. Said another way - when upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, chances are, around 83% of your open source modules will have a vetted migration path by Acquia (irrespective of whether you're a customer or not).
100% of our community migration work is contributed to the community for their maintainers to review and commit into their projects. But unfortunately, that doesn't solve all the problems:
This is where a Drupal 9 Flight Path assessment can help. Acquia, or a qualified partner, can audit your Drupal 7 site for free and provide you with a Flight Path assessment report which will help your migration team with their planning and analysis.
A migration is ultimately a short term project you want to minimize infrastructure investment on. The nature of migrations though, they often need regular data refreshing from production and need resources of their own to run the migration automation. Thats why we built Acquia Migrate: Accelerate (AMA) and made it free on Acquia Cloud. Using our database of vetted migrations, we can pre-build your Drupal 9 codebase from your Drupal 7 production site and deploy it onto its own infrastructure, built for Drupal 7 to 9 migrations. The environment comes with buttons to refresh your data, a UI and CLI tools inside Drupal to help run your migrations and once your migration is completed, you can then promote it to production with a click of another button. Easy.
Through our open source commitment to Drupal, we're making migrations away from Drupal 7 easier and faster. We're building developer tools to help with migration planning, analysis and execution. For our customers, we're even able to deliver DevOps infrastructure and D9 codebase building automation at no additional cost!
Acquia no longer provides security support for Drupal 7. However, Acquia recognizes that not all customers could migrate their Drupal 7 applications to a later version by November 30, 2025, and is committed to ensuring that the platform remains compatible with Drupal 7 Therefore, Acquia has partnered with HeroDevs to offer Never-Ending Support (NES) for Drupal 7. This program ensures that Drupal 7 applications receive any and all security updates. While purchasing this offering is not mandatory for customers, Acquia strongly recommends it as it provides a clear, official path to remain on Drupal 7 safely while they plan their migration. For more information about this offering, visit https://www.herodevs.com/support/nes-drupal.
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