For the past two years I’ve been working on something less visible but no less important.
Since DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019 (an actual in-person conference — sounds surreal in 2021, doesn’t it?!) I’ve been working on Acquia Migrate Accelerate, or “AMA” for short. In a few days, another DrupalCon Europe is starting … so perfect timing for a recap! :D
Why?
Drupal 8 comes with an awesome migration system built in, originating in the Migrate Drupal 7 module. It standardized many migration best practices. But it still required a huge time investment to learn it.
Of course, there’s the “Migrate Drupal UI” (migrate_drupal_ui) module in Drupal core. But that does not allow for granular migrations. It allows for a one-shot migration: you see which things will be migrated and which won’t. You can click a button and hope for the best. It only works for the very simplest of sites. It is impressively minimal in terms of the code it needs, but unfortunately it also means one pretty much needs to be a expert in migrations to use it successfully.
It will be of little help as soon as you run into important data you want to migrate for which no migration path exists.