ao2.it
Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

Most of the information I have come across about migrating from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 is about migrating content, however before tackling this problem another one must be solved, maybe it is obvious and hence understated, so let's spell it out loud: preserving the site functionality.

That means checking if the contrib modules need to be ported to Drupal 8, and also checking if the solution used in the previous version of the site can be replaced with a completely different approach in Drupal 8.

Let's take ao2.it as a study case.

When I set up ao2.it back in 2009 I was new to Drupal, I choose it mainly to have a peek at the state of Open Source web platforms.

Bottom line, I ended up using many quick and dirty hacks just to get the blog up and running: local core patches, theme hacks to solve functional problems, and so on.

Moving to Drupal 8 is an opportunity to do things properly and finally pay some technical debt.

For a moment I had even thought about moving away from Drupal completely and use a solution more suited to my usual technical taste (I have a background in C libraries and linux kernel programming) like having the content in git and generate static web pages, but once again I didn't want to miss out on what web frameworks are up to these days, so here I am again getting my hands dirty with this little over-engineered personal Drupal blog, hoping that this time I can at least make it a reproducible little over-engineered personal Drupal blog.

In this series of blog posts I'll try to explain the choices I made when I set up the Drupal 6 blog and how I am re-evaluating them for the migration to Drupal 8.

The front page view

ao2.it was also an experiment about a multi-language blog, but I never intended to translate every content, so it was always a place where some articles would be in English, some in Italian, and the general pages would be actually multi-language.

This posed a problem about what to show on the front page:

• If every node was shown, there would be duplicates for translated nodes, which can be confusing.
• If only nodes in the current interface language were shown, the front page would list completely different content across languages, which does not represent the timeline of the blog content.

So a criterion for a front page of a partially multi-lingual site could be something like the following:

• If a node has a translation in the current interface language, show that;
• if not, show the original translation.

The “Select translation” module

In Drupal 6 I used the Select translation module which worked fine, but It was not available for Drupal 8.

So I asked the maintainers if they could give me the permission to commit changes to the git repository and I started working on the port myself.

The major problem I had to deal with was that Drupal 6 approached the multi-language problem using by default the mechanism called "Content translations" where separate nodes represented different translations (i.e. different rows in the node table each with its own nid), tied together by a tid field (translation id): different nodes with the same tid are translations of the same content.

Drupal 8 instead works with "Entity translations", so one single node represents all of its translations and is listed only once in the node table, and actual translations are handled at the entity field level in the node_filed_data table.

So the SQL query in Select translation needed to be adjusted to work on the node_filed_data rather than of the node table, as it can be seen in commit 12f70c9bb37c.

While at it I also took the chance to refactor and clean up the code, adding a drush command to test the functionality from the command line.

The code looks better structured thanks to the Plugin infrastructure and now I trust it a little more.

Preserve language

On ao2.it I also played with the conceptual difference between the “Interface language” and the “Content language” but Drupal 6 did not have a clean mechanism to differentiate between the two.

So I used the Preserve language module to be able to only switch the interface language when the language prefix in the URL changed.

It turns out that an external module is not needed anymore for that because in Drupal 8 there can be separate language switchers, one for the interface language and one for the content language.

However there are still some issues about the interaction between them, like reported in Issue #2864055: LanguageNegotiationContentEntity: don't break interface language switcher links, feel free to take a look and comment on possible solutions.

More details about the content language selection in a future blog post.