A belated thanks to everyone who came to the UVDUG meetup back in May. I finally got around to organizing my notes from the presentations. Better late than never, right? Here's what we talked about -- please feel free to add anything I missed.
Louis and Christina attended Drupal NH Meetup Summit back in May and shared the highlights of the event with the group.
Drupal Design Camp Boston will be held the weekend of June 25-26. Registration is open.
DrupalCamp NH is also in the works. It'll be held in Manchester, and while we don't have a date settled yet, it'll likely be Oct 1.
For the presentation portion of this month's meetup, we heard from Louis and Dwight.
Agile Drupal Development (Louis)
The web team at the Human Capital Institute uses an Agile development process for their projects. This process works well in fast changing environments. A scrum cycle lasts 2-4 weeks; daily scrum sessions consist of the team reporting what they have done since the last meeting, what they will do, and what will stand in the way of accomplishing this goal.
Cycles are assigned a point value, within any task estimated to be larger than a certain amount broken down into smaller tasks. Once the team gets into the flow, time estimates can be more clearly determined.
Benefits of Agile processes: Users often don't know what they want, so requirements can be determined as the project progresses. Scrum cycles give developers a short feedback loop, with regular opportunities for improvement.
Scrum teams often use a whiteboard to track tasks. However, because developers at HC are distributed around the world, HCI uses a tool called Pivotal Tracker. And while not an agile tool per se, HCI uses Zen Desk for support ticketing.
Drush (Dwight)
Dwight walked us through Drush (Drupal shell), the command line interface for Drupal. Some of the commands we talked about were:
- site_install: drops database; reinstalls with a default user/password.
- pm-download (alias dl): Download and install projects
- pm-update: Update Drupal core and contrib projects
- updatedb: Run update.php
- cache-clear: Clear one or all Drupal caches.
- sql-cli: Open a SQL command-line interface
Some Drush commands can be used with certain modules, such as Devel. You can also create your own custom Drush commands.
More on Drush here: http://drush.ws