Site Building like a Software Engineer

In the vast majority of Drupal projects most of the site architecture is defined by clicking around in the admin area. This ends up being both extremely powerful and dangerous. To help avoid some of the dangers I propose we start taking site building as seriously as software engineers take their data and object models.

This session is intended for the site builders, architects and developers, anyone that finds themselves doing their work in Drupal's UI instead of a code editor.

I will quickly go through the most tools that help you define site architecture (content types, fields, views, field collections, field groups, beans, fieldable panel panes, etc.) and identify common patterns and anti-patterns that can either help you or send you into the middle of a black hole.

This is not a session about defining proper information architecture, I assume that someone earlier on in the project has already defined the box we are working in. Instead I will focus on how to digest a provided site architecture and not destroy it in the process of getting it into Drupal.

The end goal is to walk away with strategies that keep our sites maintainable, understandable, modifiable and robust for longer than the 30 days after launch.