Advanced Drupal

Facilitated by Neil Drumm, Senior Drupal Developer

Neil will answer all questions in a participant-driven session on the inner workings of Drupal, including the Drupal APIs.

Session Notes

Question: how do you update a drupal site?

- have a staging site

- do backups

- use diff to check for custom code that previous developers might have left in core

- use php.net and api.drupal.org to determine what functions do

- Some books "Understanding Drupal" for front end and "Pro Drupal" for developers

Question: how do you approach custom code

- Before doing an upgrade project, look through a client's codebase

- Good to set up a client

Question: my template is caching things, and it is causing trouble switching templates. What to do?

- set up a seperate subdomain for mobile devises, and switch theme based on that

- don't do changes based on user agent in the template, move to settings.php or custom module to proceed caching

Question: people want websites quickly, but how do you follow best practices?

- probably just human nature that they don't want to make a big up front investment, not much to do but try to convince them

Question: How are you using Features?

- to deploy code and also to let og groups to turn on and off features for their space

Question: What else are you working on?

- a scientific database for nature research

Question: What does your agile proceess entail?

- 1 week sprints and let clients decide what you work on each week

- make the user really make index cards, with user stories, priority, and tests on the back

- writing unit test for everything PHPunit is great

- Selenium is a browser extension that does front end testing

- you can get PHPUnit to write Selenuim tests

Question: how do you deploy a standard site?

- selenium can run a configuration script and run through all the steps of setting up a site

- drush make is one new way of deploying

- also features and patters are competing to address those issues

Question: how do you set up your selenium tests?

- write a happy path and then write a bunch of additional tests

- Selinum RC is a proxy that will allow selinim to run in headless mode and be called from PHPunit

- There is also a testing framework called Morbinum or something that has a full language

Question: what are some challenges to upgrading?

- sometimes they put php in fields