Drupal Help Needed: Website needs to be updated to Drupal 7/8

[Alexandre Courbot]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> our KDevelop website is still running on Drupal 6 which is now officially
>> unsupported! We must act _now_ to update the website to Drupal 7.
>>
>> Is anyone available to help in the effort? Otherwise I'll try to tackle this
>> task myself. I'd rather spent the time fixing KDevelop of course ;-) So if
>> someone in our user base has experience in that area - please step forward!
>
> Hi Milian,
> Thanks a lot! I wouldn't know where to start from.
>
> Would it be possible to port it  less customized so we can upgrade
> whenever they release? For my blog I use wordpress and I haven't had
> issues with upgrades. I understand the needs might be different, but
> nowadays our website is little more than news and links to the wikis.

Sorry, this is an old thread but since I am in the same situation (old
websites running Drupal 6) I thought I might share my experience.

Kdevelop.org seems to be mostly (entirely?) a collection of static
pages. Have you considered moving to a static page generator? The
advantages are numerous:

* No need for PHP/MySQL, data is easy-to-read text files
* No upgrade stress, no need to apply security fixes on the server
beyond Apache/Nginx
* Edits are simple & clean, done using Markdown and pushed to a git server
* Website is faster and more responsive since the pages don't need to
be generated

The only drawback I can see is that the data needs to be ported to the
static generator. In my case I only have a handful of pages so I just
copy/pasted the content's HTML into text files, but in the case of
KDevelop you may want to use one of the Drupal converters that exist
for most projects (or maybe just write your own).

I have chosen to use Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) but there are many
others that are probably equally suited to the task.

The biggest advantage to the switch is that you don't have to care
about the servers anymore. Is my server up-to-date? Will MySQL restart
properly after I upgrade? Oh no, I have to do a manual upgrade of
Drupal again, including putting the site off-line and running the
update scripts... All that is over. Git pull, edit, git push, and a
server hook regenerates the pages. Less time spent administrating,
more time spent doing actual development.

Dynamic things such as comments can be delegated to Javascript and
external entities (like disqus), but it is also possible to host your
own comments server.

Just for your consideration. :)

Cheers,
Alex.