tl;dr: Subscribe to my YouTube Channel; I'm going to start migrating this website to Drupal 8 on a livestream every Tuesday at 10 a.m. US Central (3 p.m. UTC).

Ever since Drupal 8 was released, I've been waffling on the decision to migrate/upgrade this website (JeffGeerling.com) to Drupal 8. The site started off years ago as a static HTML site generated by Thingamablog, a really old Java-based static blog generator.

In the years since, I migrated from Thingamablog to Drupal 6, and from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Each of these migrations also incorporated a complete redesign, and I did another semi-redesign halfway through the Drupal 7 lifecycle, to the design you see today:



Dark mode ftw!

I've written a bit about Drupal 8's successes and failures on this blog, and I'm still undecided about how I see Drupal's long-term success as a platform—especially for simpler sites like mine, which are not über-huge monstrosities with hundreds of content types, taxonomies, media styles, etc.

But I do see this site as a decent fit for Drupal 8's content model, and there is an upgrade path for every feature I currently use—though some might be a little different in implementation than Drupal 7!

Starting on Tuesday, February 4th, at 10 a.m. US Central (3 p.m. UTC), I will be live-streaming the migration of JeffGeerling.com from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can get notified when the streams begin. I don't know how long the whole process will take, but hopefully after a couple months of hour-long sessions I'll have something to show for it :)

The first stream, my plan is to get the new Drupal 8 project set up on GitHub, build out the very rough initial Drupal 8 site, set up some form of CI so I can have at least basic tests for the migration, and then see where to go from there. Future streams will work on building the new site's structure (content types, mostly), writing and testing the content migrations, upgrading the theme from PHPTemplate to Twig, and incorporating Hosted Apache Solr for site search.

The first live stream will be on YouTube, or you can watch it here: