Prepping Up For Apigee Developer Portal Migration To Drupal 8

As APIGEE end of support for Drupal 7 in May 2020 is combined with Drupal 7 end of life in Nov 2021, developer portal are not left with many choices - migrate to Drupal 8 or continue with Apigee’s integrated portals. 

For a custom Drupal 7 developer portal, migrating to Drupal 8 comes as a natural choice. In this blog we will understand why it is so important and what should be on your checklist while migrating to Drupal 8.

Benefits of Migrating Your Developer Portal to Drupal 8 

With continued effort of the Drupal community for its long-term sustainability and more effortless adoption, complete re-architecturing of Drupal 8 has made it different from the previous migrations. There are many ways why Drupal 7 can put your developer portal at risk

Drupal 8 with its performance-enhancing features and modules can turn your developer portal into a speedy and high performing one. Let’s look at what makes Drupal 8 the best version to be on:

• Drupal 8’s adoption of Symfony framework has made it all the more better. Symfony’s robust, flexible and high-performance framework allows for easy scalability of a website.
• BigPipe Caching lets you segregate your page into different sections which gets rendered as they become available, enhancing website’s performance and speed.

Source: specbee

• Drupal 8 is PHP7 ready, which is twice as fast as PHP 5.6. It is capable of enhancing the performance of your developer portal to about 110%, with reduced memory usage.

• Talking about Drupal 8 themes, they are responsive, making your developer portal look great on almost any device. 
• Drupal 8 is equipped with CKEditor, which lets you preview your entered content quickly as well as an in-place editor that lets you edit blocks, content, menus, etc. right on the same page.
• SEO will not be a concern anymore. Drupal 8’s built-in powerful SEO modules, like SEO Checklist, PathAuto, Redirect, and MetaTag can help boost your developer portal’s SEO. 
• Not to forget about Drupal 8’s out-of-the-box multilingual support, which can help boost language-based views of your developer portal.

Planning Your Migration - Your To Do Checklist

It is important to follow the best approach for the migration process. Having spent too much time on building the right content for your developer portal, you would not want to drop your stats without a proper plan. Content migration becomes a significant decision for your business. 

When you think of developer portal migration to Drupal 8, you need to look into enhancements to the front-end features such as smartDocs API reference documentation, theme editor enhancements, default portal theme and content enhancements, quick start and how developer accounts are managed using the developer identity service.

To ease the process of migration, maximum time should be spent on planning. If properly administered, this will further bring down the number of hours spent on the actual migration. Though content migration is a tedious task, however, strategizing it well in advance will make the developers smoothly execute the process.

One would need one of these two steps to migrate their developer portal to Drupal 8:

1. For minimal custom implementations on Drupal 7 portal, have Apigee Developer Portal Kickstart ready to migrate Drupal 7’s configuration and content.
2. Follow custom migration approach for heavy customizations of Drupal 7 portal. For this, Apigee Edge module can help in connecting Drupal 8 Portal to Apigee and use Drupal 8 Migration API to migrate the Drupal 7 implementations to Drupal 8 Portal.

Now, let’s take a look at the pointers to consider before migration:

• Take Backup

It is always a good practice to take a backup of your entire website before starting with the migration process. This can be done with the help of Backup and Migrate module to create a database dump to save all your Drupal database tables into a single file download, to be later used for restoring at a later stage. 

Enabling Backup and Migrate Module

1. Navigate to Administer > Modules
2. Select Backup and Migrate in the Other block
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Configuration

Configuring Backup and Migrate Module

1. Navigate to Administer > Configuration > System > Backup and Migrate
2. Download a backup of the default (Drupal) database by clicking Backup now. 

It is recommended to download a backup prior to updating or installing modules.

Backup to Server

Create a private directory to store backups on the server by following the below 3 steps:

1. Navigate to Administer > Configuration > Media > File System
2. In the Private file system path field enter sites/default/files/private
3. Click Save configuration

• Quick Roundup of Functionality and Content Check

Having a quick yet thorough check of the website for the entire set of features and functionalities of your developer portal will give you an idea of moving on from irrelevant ones. Do check if you want to drop off with any content or content types post analyzing them. This is the time when the need for new content types arises.

Like content types, it is important to figure out which of these fields should be migrated. You should check which of the fields are important in your existing site and which of them are no longer relevant for the new site. Examine the number of users logging in, reviews, ratings, views and other taxonomy terms too.

In this way, you get a chance to completely revamp the architecture of your website.

• Move Content Securely

Migrating web content is an integral business decision where you must take precautions to avoid any security breach or data theft. Ensuring your database and development infrastructure is up-to-date with the latest upgrade, wiping out all your data including user accounts from database infrastructure and not sending database dump via unsafe channels are few things which need to be kept in mind.

• Prepare a Backup Plan for Theme Mismatch

Up until Drupal 7, PHPTemplate has been the default Drupal Theme engine. But Drupal 8 uses Twigs (part of Symfony2 framework) to render pages in a highly flexible and secure way. It won’t allow your existing (D7) theme to port directly to D8. Note that no single module can move your existing theme to Drupal 8.

Upon migrating the developer portal, custom CSS styles will be overwritten. So the new default theme needs to be applied along with custom CSS styles manually post migration.

• Search Modules upon Migration

Drupal 7 core modules and many contributed modules are now available in Drupal 8 core. While most of them are automatically upgraded, a few modules will need manual upgrade as they are not mapped to the same Drupal 8 module or are now segregated into different modules. 

Due to Drupal 8’s revamped architecture, if you’re unable to find a particular contributed module in Drupal 8, you can:

• Simply archive the module’s data, or
• Find a similar community module sharing common functionality, or
• Hire a developer and get a custom module built with the required functionality

However, when it comes to custom modules, you need to port them in Drupal 8. You can hire Drupal developers who can help you with porting the modules.

All you need to do the following things before migrating the developer portal to Drupal 8: 

1. Prepare the Migration script for Drupal 8 considering the number of developers on Drupal 7 portal, capturing all the custom field data attached to a user entity. Do a parity check on Drupal 7 portal users with the new Drupal 8 portal and list all the extra fields needed to be created on the new portal. Migration script should execute avoiding the API call to Apigee to update a developer.
2. Sync Developer apps and developer API products with Drupal 8 via Apigee Contributed module. If there are any custom attributes attached to app or API products as dependent, this should be processed via custom migration script.
3. Migrate Open API spec’s documentation content on developer portal to Drupal 8 Portal via Drupal 8’s Apigee Catalog module or DevPortal Module. Migration script should write the documentation pages to new Drupal 8 portal, based on the option chosen to present doc’s on Drupal 8 Portal.
4. Migrate any other monetization related configuration (triggering get or post data to Apigee) to Drupal 8 via custom migration script. 
5. Implement customization done on contributed Apigee Devconnect module newly on Drupal 8 Portal and the data related to this implementation should be processed via migration script.

Wrapping it up

Migrating your developer portal to the latest version is a difficult decision to make. However, it proves to be a brilliant decision once you get a secure, accessible, modern, and responsive website, which suits your needs and stays compatible with updates for years.

For a successful migration that keeps in mind all these steps, you'll need to work with experienced developers. Our team of experts can help you in migrating your developer portal to Drupal 8 to future proof your digital presence, solve your queries around API security and provide a range of services around API designed with a strategy tailored to your success. Contact us today.