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 Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened.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.
Come for a ride and we’ll talk about...- 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 and removing spam users.
- Tuning content and content types - Identifying unpublished or duplicate content. Finding and removing fields not being used and identifying fields that could be removed. Analyzing content types for consolidation and changing node type on nodes.
- Tuning modules and code - Handling unneeded modules that haven’t been disabled or were disabled and not uninstalled properly. 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.
- Tuning data - Safely finding and removing old variables, fields, and tables that weren’t removed properly by the system.
- 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.