As I've been architecting Drupal solutions for almost ten years now, I've accumulated quite a bit of knowledge on devops best practices, which constitutes a sizeable amount of the consulting that I do. This includes documentation, configuration management, development processes and deployment processes. In this article, I'll be introducing Drupal Helpers, a collection of standard scripts and configurations that I use on all of my client projects (where applicable).
On October 15th, 2014, the highly critical SA-CORE-2014-005 - Drupal core - SQL injection vulnerability was announced. Shortly afterwards, research showed that sites not patched that same day could very well be compromised. Two weeks later, a public service announcement was released explaining the gravity of the situation. There was also a FAQ, a flowchart for dealing with it and a module that could potentially confirm a compromised site. Needless to say, it was a challenging time for the community.
Upgrading Drupal distributions, technically referred to as installation profiles, can be tricky. If you aren't using Drupal Core, but rather a distribution of it, it's not possible to follow standard processes for upgrading Drupal core and contributed modules. You must upgrade the distribution as a whole.
It is possible to expand compound search terms to multi-term synonyms. That is, if your Drupal site content contains text such as "dark room" or "key note", and you don't want your users to get No results pages on searches for "darkroom" or "keynote" (respectively), you'll need to do a bit of extra work to make this happen.
There are many Web hosting companies claiming their ability to host Drupal sites in the enterprise space. However, most of the time, these providers simply provide the hardware or a virtual machine (VM/VPS) with an operating system (OS) capable of hosting Drupal if you build the application stack, configure it and manage it all yourself. They may even claim that they can set all of this up for you, but they'll charge extra for the labour. They don't have a comprehensive platform as a service where instances can be automatically deployed as needed.
Drupal's strength as a content management framework is in its ability to effectively manage and display structured content through its Web user interface. However, the out-of-the-box system assumes all data is local (stored in the database). This can present challenges when attempting to integrate remote data stored in other systems. You cannot, by default, display non-local records as pages. While setting this up is in itself a challenge, it is an even bigger challenge to manipulate, aggregate and display this data through Views.
Services like LastPass are extremely popular for automatically entering credentials (username and password combinations) for logging into Web sites. They also generate passwords as needed and store them. They're not without their problems, however.
The two major issue with these types of services are the following:
If you're interested in code quality and providing a means by which to bring Drupal beginners up-to-speed on the coding standards, I recommend reviewing code from all developers. I say "all" developers because everyone needs an editor.
While there are many articles on the Web comparing the two version control systems (VCSes)Subversion (SVN) and Git (i.e. SVN vs. Git), many of them are overly technical. This one, however, attempts to provide a higher-level business case for making the switch.
