Drupal is a fantastic platform for developing complex and stunning websites, business portals, and even web based applications. As a one-person builder poking around or building a one-off, low impact product, it is sufficient to work right in the Drupal admin interface to build content types, views, panels, etc. But what do you do when you need to make adjustments and fixes without interrupting live user sessions? How do you collaborate with a team on feature development and design improvements? How can you share and distribute your derivative Drupal site as a product?

In this session, I present a common Drupal development workflow which I use daily and the tools required to facilitate it. I discuss the benefits and importance of a good workflow as well as some pitfalls, introduce Drush, Features, and Git, and as a bonus, I will dive into some real world troubleshooting techniques that I’ve found useful over the years.

Attendees should be familiar with Drupal and have experienced some Drupal pain. Such audience members will come out with the ability to:

• Get around basic commands in Drush and allow it to become second nature,
• Use Git in Drupal and other projects,
• Capture Drupal builds and configuration changes to Features and understand it,
• View Features status, understand override, and know how to revert, and
• Set up and move structure and configuration between separate server environments.

I will likely mention Acquia and Pantheon as off-the-shelf hosting options for turnkey development workflow. This part is subject to DrupalCon organizer advisory.

This will be a Drupal 7 presentation, but if someone is able to advise me, I would be happy to touch on differences between D7 and D8 with regard to this kind of workflow.