This post is a continuation of a blog series titled, “What is a good plan for implementing a Drupal website/application for organizations?” I previously discussed the need for a solid plan that defines, documents, and communicates a Drupal website/application’s requirements. A solid plan leads to a good process for building and maintaining an organization’s Drupal website/application.
“Process” is a defacto part of software development. Even if a team has no formal process, the software community has developed ways to define their software projects’ success and failures. For example, comparing the number of features a team can implement in a relationship to the number of bugs that the team is required to fix between releases can tell a lot about the success of the team’s process.
Open source software development and Drupal do have a unique process. For example, there is no enforced release schedule or best practice for contributed Drupal modules, just guidelines. The Drupal community documents and evolves its best practices and tools to implement stable, reliable, and maintainable code. Implementing Drupal is a process that can present a lot of challenges that need to be considered and addressed.
Process challenges
When managing a team’s process for building and maintaining a Drupal website/application, it is important to think about how things are implemented and configured, combined with contributing back to Open Source and Drupal.
Implementation
As previously discussed, always have a plan and assume things won’t go as planned. Because a Drupal website consists of core and contributed modules that work together, there will always be some glue code to connect or to customize the integration of different modules. Glue can get…Read More