Drupal project management from the front line

Edward KayHead of Productionedward.kay@torchbox.com @edwardkay

Three phases

1. Discovery2. Design3. Development

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Define your deliverables

Designer

Themer

Developer

Project manager

UX lead

Designer

Themer

Developer

Project manager

UX lead

Feat

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Feat

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Feat

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Discovery

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RedirectsCon!guration: This feature provides a means to redirect nodes or arbitrary paths to other nodes as well as to non-node pages such as views or taxonomy pages. The URL in the browser changes to the destination URL and will use the 301 HTTP response by default. This can be useful for the creation of short-cut URLs.

A list of URLs for which 404 responses have been returned is also provided allowing administrators to create suitable redirects.

SearchCon!guration: This feature provides an e!cient and highly con"gurable site search using the contributed Apachesolr module13. As a user types in search terms, an autocomplete feature makes suggestions based on content in the index.

Administrators can con"gure many Solr settings through the admin interface including:‣ the content types that are included in the search index,‣ relative weighting for content types and their "elds to raise or lower their standing in the site search

results,

‣ any taxonomy vocabularies to expose to the user on search results pages for ‘faceting’ ("ltering) their results, for example: http://www.ukgbc.org/search/apachesolr_search/building

The search index is updated automatically on every Drupal ‘cron’ run, typically every 15 mins.‘Search snippet’ "elds are provided allowing editors to override the summary information shown in search results for speci"c nodes.

An extra "eld is added to appropriate content types to mark them as ‘editor picks’. The editor can specify a list of terms for which this result should be returned in a clearly marked ‘editor pick’ block on the search results page.

Workflow, versioning, and scheduled publishingCon!guration: Provides a publishing work#ow for selected content types. This enables moderation of content, along with maintaining copies of previous versions and automatic publishing of approved content at a pre-determined date/time, as illustrated in our revision publishing diagram.‣ Rules and actions move nodes through the work#ow phases de"ned using taxonomy terms.‣ Only users with moderator roles are able to move content through each phase ("eld permissions are

used to hide relevant "eld from editors).‣ ‘Publish on’ "elds are used with rules scheduler to ensure actions are triggered at the appropriate times.

CLIC Sargent website scoping document 12

13 http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

User accounts for each Torchbox Drupal developer and project manager are created. Each user is set up

without a password, and Torchbox users can login and change their passwords by using the ‘forgotten

password’ functionality in Drupal. Accounts for CLIC Sargent users are not de!ned as part of this feature –

these will be covered by the custom ‘user accounts, roles, and access control’ feature.

A simple content access control framework is provided using a Drupal vocabulary called ‘access control’

and the ‘Taxonomy access control Lite’ module3 . Editors can con!gure published nodes to be either

publicly accessible (the default) or ‘member only’ (only visible to logged in users). Further access control

rules can be built on this foundation if required; these would be provided by the custom ‘user accounts,

roles, and access control’ feature.

Custom 404, 500 and maintenance pages

Con!guration: This feature implements custom handling of exceptional conditions for a Drupal

instance. In order of decreasing likelihood these are:

‣ Drupal 404 – augmenting the “page not found” using search, a key usability component of the site

‣ Drupal maintenance page – for scheduled maintenance, activated manually

‣ Drupal o"ine page – for when PHP cannot contact the database

‣ Apache 500 errors when neither PHP nor MySQL can help

Document management

Con!guration: Provides a solid, standard foundation for managing documents. This includes creating a

‘Related document’ !eld to be added to all appropriate content types as noted in ‘standard content page’.

Editors have a choice of either uploading a new document, or selecting a previously uploaded document.

An administration interface is provided for managing all uploaded documents and images.

Front-end user accounts

Con!guration: This feature provides some simple modi!cations to improve the Drupal sign-in user

experience using the LoginToboggan module4 . Speci!cally this gives:

‣ a combined account create/login form on the login page (/user)

‣ the ability to de!ne a speci!c URL to send the user to after registration

While Drupal could be con!gured to send an initial welcome email upon account creation, we

recommend such mailings are created and sent through dotMailer for consistency in style and for

providing tracking/reporting options.

Google Analytics, XML sitemap, robots.txt and SEO

Con!guration: Provides a suite of basic tools to improve and monitor SEO capabilities. The modules

used are:

CLIC Sargent website scoping document 10

3 http://drupal.org/project/tac_lite

Scoping document

Design

Development

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Five Ds of done

1. D...2. D...3. D...4. D...5. D...

Five Ds of done

1. Discovery2. Design3. Development4. Demo5. Deployment

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LimitWIP

Feature tracking

Cumulative flow

Side effects

http://www.!ickr.com/photos/hockadilly/2848274820/

1. De!ne deliverables2. Feature-driven development3. Limit WIP4. Transparent process5. Continuous improvement

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Takeaways