Migrate from CF V8 to CF 2018

Robert, STOP! You don't need to reinstall CF. 🙂

Adding to Wolf's helpful reply, first note that you do NOT need to choose to use the developer edition during the installation. You CAN, but if instead you choose the trial (as you did), then after the 30 days is up, it will simply REVERT to the developer edition. So just let that be. 🙂 And as he says, they both function essentially the same, as far as what you are testing.

(FWIW, they also function as the Enterprise edition, so if you will be buying a Standard license, just know that if you start taking advantage of some new features, some may work only on Standard. Do a google search for the coldfusion buying guide, to find out about those differences. But again, they will not matter for the migration/testing you are doing.)

Finally, as for that migration, as Wolf says, you are jumping by 5 editions. Can it be done? Yes, absolutely. I have helped people do it in recent months, and I mean 8 to 2018. And of course I have helped people migrate among all the versions in between. (And to be clear, I only do short-term troubleshooting, not development, and we were able to solve the problems they had quickly, so that they could proceed.)

Indeed, often you may experience some problem that stops the app in its tracks, on all pages, and you may want to give up--but it may be that it's something set or called from the application.cfm or cfc (or some file that calls), such that if you fix that one thing, suddenly all the pages work.

Or you may well find something failing which was allowed if done a certain way in those older versions but which no longer is allowed...and that may be scattered through your app, making many pages fail. In that case, you will need to consider using a global find/replace in your editor to correct things. Sometimes it will be easy, others not so easy. I do realize that's often a risky step, but you may have little choice. (Here's where keeping backups--or better, using version control--can be a big help.)

Finally, I see you have asked, but no: you will not find any good guide on doing THAT migration.  Adobe has covered it some in each version, as have others, in various resources, but you'd have to gather all those to assess them, to accomodate this big jump.

I don't think it's worth your time. Instead, don't worry about trying to "learn in advance" that way. Just eat the elephant one bite at a time. 

And you can ask here, or in a new thread, or you can call upon someone to guide you on a remote consulting basis. I can, as can others, who I list at cf411.com/cftrouble.

Hope it goes well. And really, it should. "You got this." 🙂