Why I believe this group is needed

Hi,

Since I wanted to keep the group description shortish, I thought it would be a good idea to give some more background information to why I believe this group is needed.

I discovered Drupal about a year and half ago. Since then I have learned a lot, as well as thinking about ways to use it for my own projects and business ideas. It has now come as far as I am planning to launch my first real Drupal based website in a few weeks.

Launching a site to the world dramatically changes, and limits, the freedom for further improvements of it, especially when it comes to changing existing live functionality. New sections and features can generally only be added as long as they follow the design specification, look and feel of the existing site.

Anything that links to the live site, be it search engines or other sites, need to know that what they link to will be accessible in the future. Even though pathauto let me configure it to keep old links, it would only create unnecessary future complications if I tinker too much with structure and URL's.

A while ago I started to search for information and guides about how to solve some of the issues I have identified will happen when the site officially is live:

• Proper Project Management for development.
• Setting up a development and testing environment that mirrors the live site.
• Organisational processes to manage the development, testing, implementation and roll out of changes and/or adding new features to the live site to minimise risk for downtime as well as "screw-ups" due to bad planning (i.e. knowledge).
• How to document and backport changes to the live site to the dev/test servers.
• What changes and adjustments needed when more people get involved working on the site.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to find much I found useful, so I began working out my own plan.

Then it struck me that this must be something than more or less everyone developing Drupal sites are facing. That made me even more confused about the lack of available information.

Sure, many generic software development project management templates and process strategies will probably work just fine for Drupal developers with a little tweaking.

But I am no expert on project management and most of the other stuff involved in this. I also think there are a lot more like me out there searching for this information.

Also I believe there are quite a few areas where these templates and processes needs to be tailored to really be simple to apply on development of Drupal based websites.

The best way of addressing this I could come up with was to create this group where we can discuss and exchange experience.

That way we can all help creating documents, guides, templates, protocol's, checklists and so on that will cover the needs for efficient development, testing and rollouts.

I know for sure that I have far from the knowledge and expertise needed to, for example, produce a process of rolling out a new feature on a live site as efficiently as possible. My choice right now seems to be to more or less trial and error. Learn from that and slowly evolve my own processes to be more efficient and automated.

If I had access to generic test protocols and checkslist, for example about how to test a newly developed feature for my live site, it would save me a lot of time. If I also had a guide on how to write an implementation guide for the rollout I would minimise the risk of "skipping" any important steps because I simply don't have the knowledge yet. Being able to do that would also minimise the downtime and risks to the live site when the rollout starts.

I believe that a lot of this is more or less the same for the majority of Drupal sites. Much like simpletest has made testing Drupal Core and Contribs much more efficient. This group might be able to do the same for custom development of features on existing live sites.

If we together can create this information I am sure it will have many positive effects:

• It will give Drupal beginners as well as people with limited project management skills a wonderful source of knowledge.
• By collaborating we can together create tailored processes, project management templates, test protocols, check lists, etc for Drupal.
• Drupal Core, module and theme developers will get valuable insight to the processes used in development, testing and roll out of both new websites and the new issues that are faced after the site is live.

I think that right now more or less every individual or organisation is inventing its own new wheel when it comes to this. Its, in my opinion, a waste of knowledge.

Looking at what Drupal 7 is focusing a lot on, usability and scalability, this is something that that is going to be important to address to make it easier for beginners as well as larger organisations to start using Drupal.

If this group can result in "blue prints" that will aid the maintenance, administration and development of Drupal based sites it will save a lot of time that instead can be put into "real" development.

My plan right now is to try and find a process and strategy that works for my current needs, a shared hosting solution, but that can be scaled and changed as the needs grow.

As soon as I have come a bit further, and got some structure, with this I will create a page in this group outlining for everyone to see and discuss. I hope I will get a lot of valuable feedback from all of you that I can use to improve working on it. Hopefully it will be good enough to also make it into the Drupal Handbook.

My goal is also that this will be something useful for everyone else in the community to save time as well as more efficiently be able to develop sites.

In the meantime I would be most interested in your feedback to this post.

It would be even more fantastic to read about the processes, etc you are using for these issues. Please feel free to post in this group about it.