What You Should Know About Drupal Update / Upgrade Management

May 26, 2009 - James Andres

Drupal should NOT be installed with the "downloaded and unzip" method.

• Check Drupal core out from CVS. See Moshe Weitzman's Drupal Best Practices
• The core "Update Status" module is a life saver. See the Update Status project homepage on Drupal.org - which is in core as of Drupal 6.x. Enable the email notification feature on all live sites, sit back and wait for your Drupal sites to tell you when they need an upgrade.
• Using the install_profile_api module is a great way to update/upgrade Drupal. Check out the Install Profile API project on Drupal.org
• Every change to the system should be done with a hook_update_N() See: http://www.tributemedia.com/blogs/james_glasgow/updating_drupal See: Updating tables: hook_update_N() functions See: Dark arts of Deploying Drupal by Drupal Guru Jeff Eaton

The Three Drupal Commandments

May 26, 2009 - Jordan Willms

It is not as if these were passed down from Mount Sinai, but they are still pretty darn important for any Drupal based project or website.

Here are the three commandments that govern any work that our teams do with Drupal. Doing so increases quality, and minimizes costs (something that we know our partners appreciate in this economic climate).

16 things to check before launching a CMS based website (e.g. Drupal)

May 20, 2009 - Jordan Willms

It is always smart to sanity check a website before deploying it into a production environment. Whether this is a brand new website, or a upgrade to an existing website, there are a laundry list of things to check before proceeding. Humans are forgetful people. Checklists are not. That is why Work at Play created a "Before Launch Checklist" are part of our Process Library (which we'll slowly be publishing out over this blog as time goes by) Here is the checklist (which can also be downloaded in PDF above). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Design

• If this is a website, does it have a custom favicon?
• Has the entire site been proof read? Who did it?
• Have you checked all the standard browsers? FF/IE/Safari/Chrome?
• Does the site still work with Javascript off? Who tested this?
• Are all pages W3C standards compliant? Who checked?
• Have all design assets been packaged for delivery to the client? (e.g. PSDs, FLAs, etc)

SEO Basics

• Are titles SEO friendly? Are meta title & description added?
• Does the client have an analytics package? Has the code been integrated?
• If the is an XML Sitemap, has the XML sitemap been submitted?
• Is the page's title in an H1 tag? (Not the site name!)

Drupal/CMS (if applicable)

• Make sure automated tasks are setup (i.e. cron or cron.php)
• Have development modules been deactivated removed from the production website?
• Is this an upgrade? Has the maintenance page been styled? Has the client been notified about the outage?
• Are on-screen error messages disabled?
• Are performance settings turned on? Caching? Compression?
• Is there a backup strategy for files & database?

This checklist is living document -- please let us know anything you believe we are missing and we'll improve the list.

6 Quick and Simple techniques to speed up Drupal performance

April 15, 2009 - Ronn Abueg

Attaining performance and scalability in any large production Drupal site requires a substantial amount of time and effort. In addition, speed gains become smaller and smaller after more and more work is done. Eventually, it feels like the exercise is becoming futile. On the other end of this optimization, you can do a few small things to a small Drupal site and considerably decrease load times; and (almost) no coding is required. Here are 6 suggestions that will help almost any Drupal site and they are easy to do. This is based on years of experiencing with Drupal, and some lovely research done by my Drupal peers, such as the great performance writeups at 2bits.com

How to SEO a Drupal Website

April 12, 2009 - James Andres

Drupal, even with a vanilla install, is highly search engine optimized. However, there are several modules that can help you increase the search engine friendliness of any Drupal installation. And lets face it, search engine traffic is by far the cheapest, and is the most effective: When someone searches for something in Google, they are ALREADY in the so-called "marketing funnel". Without further delay, this is what Work at Play developers do when they amp up the SEO of Drupal.