Migration from Drupal 6 to 8: What does it mean for you?

For a client who owns an active Drupal 6 website, Drupal 8 promises a whole lot of opportunities. Although we know that Drupal 6 can cater to everything that is needed to create a platform that fits our requirement, Drupal 8 offers the extra edge which allows us to build something faster and more stable. And this is the key for any modernized platform. In this respect, it is likely that Drupal 8 provides a much easier transition to a great working site.

Advantages for Webmasters:

• Improved content editing/authoring experience: Content management becomes more efficient with the significantly improved content creation page and options in Drupal 8.
• In-line editing: This offers a fast and user-friendly experience for any webmaster, as you'll be able to see how the edited content would translate visually into the final site content.
• Built-in WYSIWYG editor: Drupal 8 provides new built-in WYSIWYG editor that will allow you to edit your content directly at the front-end.
• Responsive images: Drupal 8 provides improved ways for better handling of images for responsive websites.
• Fully responsive: Administer your site from your smartphone. Changes to the content can be made from your smartphone or tablet.
• Multilingual support: The multilingual features and enhancements in Drupal 8 will help you go global and manage your content in a more centralized way, with the effective tools and processes in place.

Advantages for Customers:

• Mobile-First: Mobile website and app have become a way of life; your customers will be delighted with the experience that your site offers across all devices.
• Better front-end performance: Efficient way of caching of entities, smarter javascript loading techniques, and responsive images are going to serve the pages faster in Drupal 8 than ever before.
• Personalized experience: Since Drupal 8 is easily customizable and supports HTML5, customers will enjoy highly interactive and personalized user experience.
• Accessibility: Drupal 8 will be beneficial for visually impaired users. The internal method “Announce” will facilitate module developers to create direct output to screen readers.

Advantages for Developers:

• More standardization: Since, Drupal 8 is more standardized, even developers who are not familiar with Drupal can easily understand it and the projects will be more readable and transferable, benefiting business continuity.
• Programming facilitated Integration: The RESTful API module in the core of Drupal 8 will enable you to move information and data in and out with seamless integration in mobile applications or social media.
• Object oriented programming: Since Drupal 8 supports object oriented programming, the code is more maintainable, has fewer bugs, and hence requires less rework.
• Testing: The use of Object Oriented programming will provide the capability of testing certain functionality automatically. Proper unit tests will become easier.
• Autoloading: With the PSR-4 autoloading, classes are organised in a standardised way in files and folders which makes it easier to interpret and share.
• Twig: Drupal 8 offers more flexibility in theme customization via Twig, a standard providing an easy to use format for non-technical users.

At Zyxware, we have a talented pool of Drupal developers, designers, and technical experts who will help you make a hassle-free transition to Drupal 8. Call us today to know more about our Drupal development services. So, what are you waiting for? So, if you own a Drupal 6 website, it's time to upgrade to Drupal 8 to give your customers a superior experience!