Drupal Site Tuneup - Vroom Vroom!

During the development process, your site goes through many changes as you figure out which modules to use, solidify your content types and views, configure features, and deal with bugs in core, community, and custom modules. Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened. This is even more likely with a larger development team and when development is going fast.

At some point, you need to slow down and make time to do a site tuneup to get rid of old cruft and keep the site humming along. Ideally, this would happen before launch. Realistically, this might not happen until post-launch after the frenzy has died down and more routine maintenance mode has kicked in. But… it needs to happen, and it needs to happen regularly. How regularly depends on how much change happens on the site.

Tuning strategy - What types of things might need tuning over time, a strategy for managing and tracking these changes, and dealing with dev => stage => prod and features.

Tuning users - Finding, removing, and reducing spam users.

Tuning content and content types - Identifying spam and duplicate content. Finding and removing unneeded or problematic fields. Analyzing content types for consolidation.

Tuning modules and code - Handling unneeded modules that haven’t been disabled or were disabled and not uninstalled properly. Safely finding and removing old module variables that weren’t removed properly by the system. Identifying modules that could be eliminated by removing or replacing functionality. Core and module updates, checking for hacks to core and community modules, and seeing if patches are still relevant.

Tuning views - Finding and removing unused views and identifying views for consolidation.

Tips to minimize tuneups - To make tuning easier going forward, we’ll talk about being more careful during the development cycle to introduce less “stuff” that might need cleanup later.

Although this talk assumes you know Drupal terminology and concepts and has been marked as intermediate, Drupal newbies will benefit from this session as well. You will learn some Drupal (and general) development best practices.

If you are looking for performance talks, check out the Performance and Scaling track.

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at many DrupalCons, BADCamps, Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out Kristen's drupal.org page and her Hook 42 team page for more info. This "Drupal Site Tuneup" talk was presented at DrupalCon Austin 2014 as well as other Drupal events.