Upgrading a website software version is one of the most complicated task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Drupal 7 upgrade guide? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : Note that you don’t need to know anything about PHP to build a site in Drupal. When you search (preferably on Google) for a solution to your latest Drupal problem, a lot of the pages that come up will be providing snippets of PHP code. This is not the correct help information for you, the Drupal newbie. This is for technically competent people who are able to build their own modules and stuff like that. If you look at the other pages thrown up by your search, you will probably find an answer to your problem which involves working within the existing Drupal core and modules. That means, a solution you can implement using menus and tickboxes and whatnot, without needing to mess around with code.
Drupal 8 turned one in the November of 2016. It is about time that the Drupal 7 website owners and administrators should start considering upgrading the websites to Drupal 8. With the Drupal team focused on improving Drupal 8, it is inevitable that Drupal 7 will stop getting official updates in the near future. The great thing about upgrading to Drupal 8 is the remarkably easy process as a result of the inclusion of a few great migration modules in its core. When done with the installation of the modules, you will have to navigate to the upgrade path. For this, go to www.yoursite.com/upgrade (remember to replace yoursite with the name of your Drupal 8 website). You will be brought to the following screen. Please make sure you follow the directions on the screen before proceeding.
Whether you’re updating from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7, or importing data from some other source, you need to know about the migrate system in Drupal 8. This guide provides a comprehensive look at the features of the Drupal 8 migrate API for both Drupal-to-Drupal updates, and migrating from any external datastore into Drupal.
Update your site to the latest version of Drupal 6 (core and contributed modules). Before upgrading to Drupal 7, disable and uninstall modules you know you won’t be using in the new site. To help determine which modules to uninstall, you could review the list of modules included in the distribution, which often are found in the download in the directory profiles/[distribution_name]/modules. If a given module is not in the distribution and you don’t foresee needing its functionality on your new site, you may choose to uninstall it.
The steps above outline how to get a distribution minimally installed on an existing site. But you’ll still have a lot of work to do to reconcile your existing site content and structure with what has been created by the distribution. Here are a few tips to get you started–but you should begin with the assumption that there will be lots more you’ll discover and need to fix. Blocks and contexts. Many distributions use the Context module to position blocks. Your existing site may use the core Block module for this purpose, may use Context or some other tool, or may use a combination of tools for block placement. With your new distribution’s blocks displaying as well as those enabled by your existing site, you may get more than you need or want. To address this issue, selectively disable blocks left over from your existing site. If they were custom blocks, you may wish to delete them. Read extra details at Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.