Upgrade from Drupal 7

Just sharing my upgrading experience from Drupal 7.

It's been a few weeks since the CKeditor 4 module is no longer supported for my Drupal 7 site and I've been constantly warned to uninstall it. Although I haven't updated my site since 2015 (!) with new blog posts, I don't feel like uninstalling it and leaving a empty space. So I thought maybe it's time to try to upgrade to Backdrop.

So, the current Backdrop version is 1.27.0. That's nice. I also see that now CKeditor 5 is now included.

I went through the planning phase, where I wrote down which modules have been migrated to core, others deleted and others that have their replacements in the contrib repository. I disabled all removed modules, downloaded the ones from the contrib directory and started the upgrade process. During the prepare phase, I disabled and uninstalled the block module by mistake. When running core/update.php from Backdrop, the process stopped with an error since it found no block tables. "Tough luck" was my first thought. "I might not upgrade to Backdrop eventually...". Going back to the procedure in the documentation, I noticed that disabling the block module was a mistake (instead of disabling the blog module which was removed from Backdrop, I disabled the block module). So, I started again. This time I did not disable any modules that were removed from the core but they were already ported in the contrib repository. This time, the upgrade process finished successfully!

Going through the settings, I also notice jQuery 3.7.x! That's also another nice addition, jQuery 1.x was way too old. I converted the database to use the utf8mb4 charset. There are still many settings to check in the administration dashboard, so I need some time. There's no module used in the old Drupal site that has not been ported in the contrib, so that's another win-win situation for me. Even if there was any, I would probably uninstall it completely.

So far so good. I must check the blog content from the old site if everything's displayed correctly and I must find a theme to match my liking. I'm really glad the performance is so good, the pages load instantly.

A final note: Backdrop does offer a upgrade path from Drupal 7, but the process is rather cumbersome for a novice user. The user must know about filesystem handling, database import/export and file editing. I'm not complaining and I'm really glad there's a upgrade path from Drupal. Thinking about it, I'm not really sure if this upgrade path could become easier, just saying.

Kudos to all the Backdrop developers!