Drupal Express (DX) to Drupal 10 Upgrade/Migration Strategies

Many Georgia Tech websites have been built using Drupal Express (DX), which is a custom version of Drupal that allows you to create a website with little technical or design expertise. The ready-made site comes with built in features and tools like news and events listings, and mobile optimization.  The Office of Information Technology offers Drupal Express as an option when requesting a new web hosting account.  Selecting this option causes Drupal Express to be pre-installed in the account so that the unit can start using the site almost immediately without having to do any technical work on the back end of the site.

In spite of the continued use of the name, there is very little technical similarity between Drupal Express for Drupal 7 (we'll call this Drupal 7 Express) and the current Drupal Express for Drupal 10 (we'll call this Drupal 10 Express).  If you are running a Drupal 7 Express site, you will need to completely rebuild your site in Drupal 10 or another content management system.  This is a good time to assess your site and determine if it might be a better fit for something like Sites@Georgia Tech - OIT's article "Is Drupal the right choice of CMS for my site?" goes into some of the pros and cons of both Drupal 10 and Sites@Georgia Tech.

If you choose to move forward to Drupal 10, the following guidelines and tips will help you plan for a manual site migration from Drupal 7 Express to Drupal 10 Express:

• Vertical, Horizontal, and Multipurpose page types are not going to be ported to Drupal 10 and will not be copied over by the Drupal Migrate tool. Such pages will have to be completely rebuilt in Drupal 10 using the new layout system called Layout Builder.
   
• Drupal 7 Express sites may still benefit from using the Drupal Migrate tool to at least bring over their Basic Page content. Bear in mind that some amount of clean-up will be necessary after using Migrate, but the clean-up may be easier than cutting and pasting a lot of Basic pages into your new site.
  
  Kevin Pittman has posted a detailed Drupal Migration guide that describes how to use the Migrate tool.  (The guide is labeled for migrating to Drupal 8, but the concepts still apply when migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10.)
   
• Other components included in Drupal Express may not be available for Drupal 10 or may have been superseded by new components. A breakdown of known Drupal Express components and their status is posted below.

In case you are enlisting the help of someone with technical developer skills who would like to know more about the make-up of Drupal Express and what to expect when migrating a Drupal Express site to Drupal 10, below is the full list of components included in Drupal Express (excluding minor ones no longer needed in Drupal 8+) and their known Drupal 10 status.

Please note that just because a module has a production version, this does not mean that it works the same as it did in Drupal 7 or that it supports all of the features in the Drupal 7 version.  Please read the documentation for each module to see what has changed.