The WGBH.org Development Blog

So while Phil has been blogging up a storm these past few weeks, I’ve been officially slacking in my devblog responsibilities. Truthfully, I’ve been doing things that certainly quality as blog-worthy, but between conferences (definitely blog-worthy), coding (possibly blog-worthy), and catching a pretty bad cold last week (definitely NOT blog-worthy), I’ve been either too busy or too full of Sudafed to write a decent post for the site.

Now that I’m back in the office I can relax (ha!) and translate my reams of notes into some coherent information to share on this blog.

Drupalcon was a great conference, and I think we all got a lot out of it. There were a few key sessions that I’ll probably write about in more depth, but here are some of my big takeaways form the conference:

Drupal 6 is Awesome

I admit that I wasn’t really paying attention to Drupal 6 until beta 3 was released. It caught me off guard, because I saw so many great features in the new version that I really can’t wait to start using it.

Actions and Triggers

The possibilities here are endless, especially for any web site that has a publishing process that is any more complex than simply writing a blog post and pushing submit. Actions are events that can be fired off (such as sending an email) by a trigger event (such as saving a new post). A more complex series of triggers and actions could be the backbone for a great publish/review/moderate workflow.

Theming

My prediction: 2008 is the year when Drupaling theming is really going to shine. In the past there have been a handful of Drupal sites that really stand out from a design perspective, but time and time again, I have heard people say “…but I don’t want it to look like a Drupal site.”

The improvements to the phptemplate theme engine in Drupal 6, combined with tools like Firebug (not a Drupal-specific tool, but awesome nonetheless) and the Theme Developer (included as part of the Devel module. which Phil mentioned in a previous post), are going to give themers a lot more flexibility. In fact, it was interesting to hear how often “theming” was referred to at Drupalcon, as a separate process beyond the design and development. Theming is being recognized as the complex glue that ties together the data and the presentation layers.

Performance

There’s a lot going on under the hood of Drupal 6 that I am not clued into, but the overall consensus is that Drupal 6 is fast. Javascript aggregation will speed up page loads in the same manner that CSS aggregation did in Drupal 5.x. The menu system, which has always been a complex and database heavy system, has been completely rewritten. And there is a lot of information out there about performance tuning for Drupal, database tuning, and new caching options.

Development Tips and Tricks

With so many seasoned Drupal developers in one place, it was impossible not to be exposed to new and helpful development tricks. Some key examples:

• Testing code in a separate PHP file.
  The first tow lines of index.php perform a full Drupal bootstrap. You can copy that code into a new PHP file (in the root Drupal directory) add additional testing code to that page, and test the page directly in your browser. This makes it really simple to run basic tests and write the output directly to the browser.
• Install the API module locally.
  I use api.drupal.org pretty regularly - it’s a great reference tool for finding functions and documentation. But only Drupal core is indexed on that site, no contrib modules. You can install the API module and use it on your own install to view not only Drupal core AND contrib modules that you use, but also your own custom modules.
• Finding new modules
  With so many contributed modules out there, it’s hard to know where to start when you need a specific functionality. One suggestion is to subscribe to individual RSS feeds for CVS commits, project nodes, and Planet Drupal to monitor activity on different projects. With a good feed reader, you can bookmark away those interesting projects for the day you might need them.
• Coder module
  The Coder module is a code analysis tool that is installed just like any other module. It performs a handful of functions, including:
• code style review - a rule-based engine that compares code against the established Drupal coding standards — checking for proper syntax, string concatenation, use of globals, positioning of curly brackets.
• comment review - checks for proper spacing and indentation, and for CVS $id$ tags
• SQL review - checks for proper syntax and for curly braces around table names
• upgrade review - this will flag code that may need to be modified for compatibility with the next version of Drupal, such as forms API, scheme API, menu, and .info file changes.
• security and performance review - It checks for SQL injection and some other security concerns, but this portion of Coder is rather limited in it’s current abilities.

Coder can analyze all the code on your site, or just selected modules. It does not make changes to the code for you, but it will provide line numbers and descriptions of the problematic code. Seems like this could be a very handy tool, especially when building a site with other developers.

The Future of Drupal

There is already a lot of talk about Drupal 7, and there are some really cool ideas being kicked around. Which is a little disconcerting when you are trying to build sites with Drupal, knowing how fast it is moving. But the forward momentum is good - this conference did a lot to assure me that Drupal is has a really strong future and is not going to end up in the CMS graveyard.