Click here to watch Drupal Site Tuneup - Vroom vroom!

Beep beep!

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 Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened.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, 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.

Vroom! Vroom!

Intended Audience

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.

NOTE: This is not a performance talk

If you are looking for performance talks, check out:

• A Perfect Launch, Every Time: 7 steps to double your website’s performance
• Next Generation PHP Performance
• Planning for Performance
• The Caching Deep Dive
• Thunder and Lightning: LoadStorm and Other Ways to Stress Out Your Drupal Site
• Understanding XHProf: Pinpointing Why Your Site is Slow and How to Fix it

About the driver/speaker:

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at DrupalCon Portland, BADCamps, Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out her drupal.org page for a partial list of presentations and check out more info at http://www.hook42.com/team/kristen-pol.