Good Drupal leadership begins with a good plan. A good plan requires a vision specific to its particular business. Drupal, like any software, is a tool that empowers an organization to build its vision and address its business requirements. The fact that a Drupal website/application consists of Drupal core, with contributed modules and themes, that are glued together using custom code, creates a unique set of challenges to ensure each aspect is done right.
Drupal is both a Swiss Army knife with a massive variety of tools and a set of Lego®-like building blocks used to compose a custom and ideally optimized solution that addresses each and every business requirement with precision. Drupal is highly flexible, and presents a variety of options. Having a plan is essential – without one, an organization could find itself in a pickle with an unstable and insecure website/application.
Planning challenges
Recognizing that Drupal provides flexibility helps organizations work towards a plan for building and maintaining a stable website.
Flexibility
Drupal is a modular framework that allows developers to add and remove features as needed. There are several ways to solve common feature requests and dozens of ways to enhance existing features and functionality. Drupal’s flexibility is one of its strengths that in turn requires effort to ensure stability and maintainability.
Stability
Drupal core provides a stable code base to build from, but as contributed modules are added to a Drupal stack, each module has different levels of support and stability. Realistically, regressions and issues will inevitably occur when updating Drupal core and modules. If a regression is caught before it is pushed to production, I think it’s reasonable to reconsider labeling it a regression or just part of the process of updating…Read More
