Site Administrators

Georgia Tech’s primary supported content management system (CMS) is Drupal. The majority of websites at the Institute using Drupal are currently on Drupal 7.

Since Drupal 8’s release, there has been increased interest in transitioning to Drupal 8 across the Institute. Georgia Tech Information Technology and Institute Communications (IC) would like to share additional information and recommendations on this for campus.

This section contains tips on how to install Drupal from scratch, how to apply routine point release updates, and how to migrate between major version of Drupal.  There is also a guide to moving sites from development (either on your local computer, or on a development server) to a production environment (e.g. OIT Web Hosting).  For more generic but also more official guidance, the official Drupal website has a Guide to Migrating a Drupal Site.

Per Kevin Pittman's insight posted on the GTDUG Team:

With Drupal 7.61, be aware that you're now likely to see a bunch of "SimpleXMLElement" errors on the Modules Update screen. This is caused whenever a module's project status data can't be retrieved. 

Causes

There are two cases that will have to be addressed:

The following table, initially provided by the College of Computing (many thanks!) attempts to summarize the details of a large number of commonly used Drupal 7 modules and any known issues with their latest full (not development) version under PHP 7. In addition, Kevin Pittman of the College of Liberal Arts has added Drupal 8 compatibility details and removal recommendations, to help site administrators decide what to do as they review the modules installed their Drupal 7 sites.

PHP 5.6 (the last version in the PHP 5 line) reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2018. In addition, PHP 7.0 also reached its end of life in December, 2018.  As a result all OIT Web Hosting accounts are now on PHP 7.1 or later.  Units who have their own web servers are strongly urged to get them updated to PHP 7.1 if they haven't done so already.

Per Georgia Tech's accessibility requirements, certain fields likely need additional explanatory text accompanying them:

Video Fields (e.g. YouTube)

Any publicly available video must be captioned for end-users. YouTube's automatic captions are not enough to meet full guidance: any automatic captions must be manually reviewed and corrected.

Kevin Pittman has written a blog post called "So, You Blew Up Your Drupal 8 Site - Now What?" that covers multiple methods for recovering a dead Drupal 8 website (on the assumption you hadn't made a backup right before it died).

Many Georgia Tech websites have been built using Drupal Express (DX), which is a custom version of Drupal 7 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.

Migration, not Upgrading

Drupal 8, released in November of 2015, is a major rewrite of the Drupal core engine and APIs. Because Drupal 8 has changed so much, there is no direct in-place upgrade path to go from any earlier version of Drupal to Drupal 8. Instead, Drupal 7 and earlier sites must be migrated to Drupal 8, which involves setting up a whole new Drupal 8 website and copying into it (manually or automatically) the content of the older website.

You can find Georgia Tech's license for Font Awesome 5 on Github.

Recommended Usage

We strongly recommend utilizing the SVG icons for usage in your Drupal website, due to accessibility and compatibility concerns.