Drupal 7

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.

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.

To use the CAS PEM certificate installed on websites hosted on OIT webhosting, please use the following path:

 /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt

Issue

After updating to the 2.9 version of the GT Theme, the formatting is broken for custom content types (such as Super Blocks and Slideshow Carousels), usually those created via the Features module. Often the types show CSS classes as text instead of as visual styling.

Example of broken Super Blocks

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.

If your Georgia Tech Drupal website has the GT Editor feature package installed, then it also has the Linkit module, which gives you an enhanced interface for creating links to local content.

Accessibility and Usability of Links

To comply with accessibility law, and good sense usability guidelines, always make the visible text of your link something that clearly indicates what the website visitor is going to be taken to when following that link.  Some examples of improper link text include:

This page covers the creation of different types of links using the standard CKEditor link tool.  If your website is using the GT Editor or otherwise has the Linkit module installed, then you will have some additional options as described on the Creating Links in GT Editor (Linkit).

When (and When Not) to Use a Table

Tables should only be used for the display of tabular data (data that is connected to one or more headings).

Do not use tables for any of the following reasons: