As part of my role at work I am lucky to have access to some fantastic tools (and a few brains!) which have meant I have been able to setup my personal site with a few good tools from work.

Post migration of content from Drupal 6 (using 8.0.4) an odd thing happened!  All the blog body field entries were empty, nothing, nada, zip, zero. After fiddling and faffing with things for a little longer than I am comfortable admitting I went to create a new blog post as a test and then noticed that of course the input formats (aka Text formats) had also been migrated.

Editing the "Filtered HTML" format that was imported threw up this:

So it seems that there's a few issues which hold up a d6-d8 migration, some are essentially core features (Taxonomy term values referenced on nodes do not migrate (D6)), and some which obviously have weight but have failed to garner any attention to date (d6 Imagecache -> d8 Image module migration should be included in core).

More for another day now...

So having fiddled with the migration via drush a little, and having restored the database a few times along the way (thanks drush ard/arr) I now have all my content in D8. Seems like taxonomy terms didn't make it (but vocabularies did).

To get the migration to complete without skipping all the nodes completely I had to apply a patch from Skip the row when we don't recognize the the field type to get nodes working.

Seems like Taxonony terms also need work.

So with the default manifest.yml from d.o, and running the migrate-manifest command:

So first logical steps besides fiddling with all the features in D8 is to get the migration from this old D6 site setup. So let's begin by enabling the migrate and migrate UI modules.

Next step according to the instructions at Executing a Drupal 8 migration seems to be to ignore the UI entirely and head back to drush again.

So looking with fresh eyes at my semi working version of D8, which was installed via the web based installer it was clear that something was just fundamentally wrong. So as with so many Drupal based activities it seems logical to turn to drush (you'll need the version that works with drush 8 of course) to save the day!

So it turns out that my own stupidity (or smart arse idea!) caught me out. I install drupal core in a separate directory out of the web root (docroot!) directory and symlink back to it. My web root looks a little like this:

So the first challenge has been to get the install working. I seem to be stuck on the Requirements install screen! No combination of file or directory permissions, or manually creating the files and settings.php/services.yml files seems to work.

Fun times!

As this blog is pretty much redundant as anything useful in my personal life, and I tend to put updates and interesting things into Facebook (stupid walled gardens!), I am going to use this blog as a means to document some learnings around Drupal 8 and specifically a move from this install of Drupal 6 directly up to Drupal 8.