Thursday, 12 March 2015

Pitfalls you must avoid in Drupal development


Among the current crop of Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal is certainly a leading player in developing impressive content that is well tailored to the web. Drupal does require in first place, some knowledge on web design and development (for novices, there’s Wordpress). Therefore, certain things need to be taken care of when you build a Drupal website. Let us look at what you should avoid when you build a Drupal site.

Pitfall 1: Overlooking security during deployment

It doesn't take much time for a developer to take possession of production code and install it on their systems. Which essentially means it is free for use by anybody who wishes to use it. While you can let developers take a few snapshots and have other access to the development environments otherwise, do not allow access to the production environment except to those who are involved.

Pitfall 2: Repair (is not) better than maintenance?

By all means, Drupal has gained the reputation of a well-built CMS that is expected to stay for a long while. However, keeping things updated ensures an optimum experience for your visitors. If gone unnoticed, chances are that the site may be hacked which of course, would cost you much more.

Pitfall 3: Outdated code for Core as well as contributed Modules.
Some times, businesses do prefer outdated code thinking it will save them some money. But ask developers, they will tell you that keeping all modules and core as current as possible holds you in the long run.

Pitfall 4: Outdated development and staging environments.

Let’s say for instance, that developers test only during production since the other environments have old data or no possible connection to an external service. Make sure that you maintain the testing environments as close to production as possible. By doing this you can migrate to production with ease and execute tests thereby assuring that code changes work when moved to production.

Pitfall 5: Saving extraneous files in the VSC repository.

Image files, pictures, and database dumps are usually relegated to the repository which is an extremely unhealthy practice. You need to keep the VSC as clean as possible.

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