Articles tagged with "code management"

There are some key files like robots.txt and .htaccess which are often tweaked for Drupal websites. These can be considered part of the 'scaffolding' of a site - they control the way the site works, rather than its content or design. Any new release of Drupal core that includes changes to them specifically mentions that they need updating, as those changes may have to be merged with any customisations made on your site. For example, there was a security release that added rules to .htaccess, which were essential for any site to incorporate and the template settings file, default.settings.php...

We've heard of test-driven development, behaviour-driven development, feature-driven development and someone has probably invented buzzword-driven development by now. Here's my own new buzzword phrase: review-driven development. At ComputerMinds, we aim to put our work through peer reviews to ensure quality and to share knowledge around the team. Chris has recently written about why and how we review our work. We took some time on our last team 'CMDay' to discuss how we could make doing peer reviews better. Here's some of our thoughts. Many of them are essentially answers to this question: Why is reviewing hard? How can we make it easier?

Much has been said about last month's highly critical Drupal security issue 'SA-CORE-2014-005', otherwise known as 'Drupalgeddon'. It was covered by mainstream international media, even if the reaction needs addressing. Drupal's security team take a responsible approach to security issues - being open & honest in disclosing them with fixes, in keeping with the community values. Security issues should always be expected in any software, it's how they are dealt with that speaks far more.

We patched all the sites that we had access to immediately fix, and informed all our clients of the issue as soon as possible. If you host a Drupal site, and haven't yet, run through the Drupalgeddon workflow right now.

With large Drupal projects, especially those in their post-live phase, good code and release managment becomes vital.
Update hooks provide the mechanism by which database changes can be scripted and deployed to the live server, this article assumes you are already well versed with the ways of update hooks.
The two main problems we have with update hooks occur on multi developer projects

Same function is implemented in 2 branches. Imagine the situation where you have 2 seperate branches open on the same project, with different developers working on each branch.
Both branches want to update the module crm_integration so...