Alkuvoima+East Group, a Finnish strategic digital marketing agency, invited us to join one of their interesting events in Helsinki. We were asked to present some hot topics like: ‟Drupal 8 — What’s Cooking?”, ‟Migrate to Drupal 8” and ‟Drupal 8 as a mobile backend” along with another cutting-edge presentation: ‟Drupal and Apache Stanbol”. The big interest aroused by the ‟Migrate to Drupal 8” topic inspired me to elaborate on this subject.

At Drupalcon Prague 2013 Dries announced the switch to a migration-based upgrade and the move of Migrate module in Drupal core. In this write-up I will introduce you to migration basics: concepts, flow, components and then I will illustrate a complete migration process, as it works, now, in Drupal 8 by explaining how a real migration has been implemented in a real module. Here we go!

Note: The Twig conversion acts here more as a pretext to showcase the power and flexibility of using Apache JMeter™ as a benchmarking tool for Drupal.

Staring with release 8, Twig was adopted as theme engine for Drupal. The conversion of PHPTemplate theme_*() functions and *.tpl.php template require also benchmarking.