Some of you may be familiar with the QA Checklist module. (Try a demo.) It provides a list of modules to install and best practices to follow when building and deploying a Drupal site, and it tracks your progress against it. It's kind of a pre-flight checklist, and though somewhat rudimentary, it's helpful—especially for inexperienced site builders.
I've recently taken over the module. I'd like to build it into something more comprehensive, and I figured this would be the place to ask for help. I realize most of you don't need (and maybe wouldn't use) such a module. I hope you'll look at it as an educational tool—a way to help less experienced Drupalers make their sites faster, safer, and more secure. Would you share your QA best practices and task lists with me or point me to authoritative resources at #1645936: Re-invent QA Checklist? I would appreciate it!
Addendum: To preempt a question I've received from others, I'm aware of the existence of modules like Security Review that automatically test for problems. QA Checklist differs in at least these ways:
- Intent: It's not designed to find problems; it's designed to guide in the application of best practices, teaching along the way. Security review is more of a sanity check. QA Checklist is more of a to-do list or a recipe.
- Scope: It includes performance-related, backup strategy, and SEO tasks in addition to security.
- Use case: It tracks task completion with timestamps and uids so a project manager, for example, knows not only what's done but who says they did it and when.
I think most people have their own checklists. This is just designed to create a well thought-through base for people to build on. (If you like this concept, by the way, check out the new Checklist API.)
Comments
Great idea!
My team has had a lot of internal discussion about putting together some sort of robust preflight checklist and this looks like a great starting point. Let me try to round up some input to help push it along.
Chris Hales - mediacurrent.com
Config Check and Prod Check modules
Hey there,
My team has already made some progress toward this. I published a module a ways back called Config Check:
http://drupal.org/project/config_check
Right now it's D6 only, but I'm pretty close to releasing a D7 version (probably about a month from now – I'm heading on vacation in a few hours). The D7 version is a big rewrite which builds off the Production Check module:
http://drupal.org/project/prod_check
It would be great if we could all somehow combine our efforts.
What might a combined effort look like?
I'm always in favor of working together. My first thought is that those two modules could at least be recommendations in the QA Checklist. What kind of ideas do you have for actually combining efforts, or what do you think a combined module would look like? Perhaps a comparative analysis in one of the issue queues would be in order.