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Drupal Site Building Best Practices
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README.md

Better Drupal Building

  • Custom glue should be accomplished with configuration first and PHP code second.

Configuration Management and Dependencies

  • Use Composer (or Drush Make) to build your project and it's depencies.
  • Store your work in files.
  • Set your config directory above the webroot.
  • Sync UUIDs across all developers.

Theming

  • Frontend automation should use Gulp to automate tasks like livereload and sass.
  • Yeoman should be used to generate project themes.
  • SCSS syntax SASS should be used to generate CSS.
  • Themes should apply to Drupal without using #id,content-type, block-id, or view-id in the source.
  • Each theme should have reusable patterns rather than top down pages.
  • Themes should use Blockify rather than hard coding blocks into templates.
  • Single field, node, block, view PHP Templates should be avoided.

Editor Experience

  • Content should be editable by the site editor without modifying code, css or complex configuration.
  • Content should have an edit in place contextual gear.
  • Content should not be defined in code.
  • It should not require admin access to figure out how to edit content.
  • The editor user should have links or a dashboard that links to “hidden” editor pages.
  • Editors should be given the Clear Cache permission.
  • CKeditor should be the JavaScript editor.
  • Editors should be able to apply custom CSS via a drop down menu.
  • Taxonomy can be used to apply additional page styles

Content

  • Content should be a node.
  • Taxonomy should categorize nodes. It should not store content.
  • A site should have as few content types as reasonable (4 - 6 is a good goal).
  • Content types should be singular
  • Taxonomy vocabulary should be plural
  • Field names should be singular or plural based on the number of values in the field.
  • Fields should be reused when possible.

Blocks

  • Context should be used to place blocks.
  • Blocks should only be used sparingly. Consider creating a block view of a node marked by taxonomy instead.

Lists

  • Lists should render the teaser view mode of content
  • Custom displays should be accomplished by adding additional view modes.
  • Content should be listed with views.
  • Views should use the rendered entity format unless it’s impossible to do so.
  • List should be ordered with draggable views.

Search

  • Search boxes should not be labeled and they should contain HTML5 placeholder text.
  • Search API should power site search. Core search should not be used.
  • Search API should be powered by Solr or Elastic Search backend.
  • Facets should be avoided in favor of views filters.
  • All fields should be indexed including category names.
  • Search should allow stemming, spelling correction and related searches.
  • Current Search should not be used.

Breadcrumbs

  • Breadcrumbs that don't match URL structure should be avoided.
  • Easy Breadcrumbs module should be used to map URLs to breadcrumbs.

Permissions and Roles

  • Editors should have permissions limited to the set of tasks they perform 80% of the time.
  • Testing should be done as the editor user.

Caching

  • Varnish should be used.
  • Block Caching must be enabled.
  • If users log in, then modules that disable block caching should not be used.
  • Page cache should be on.
  • Views Content Cache should be added and used on all views except random views.
  • Random Views should be avoided. If used, they should be set to 30 minute time cache.
  • Views Cache should be set to not expire.
  • System cron should be run weekly to avoid resetting HTML page cache.

JavaScript

  • JavaScript should be non-blocking and loaded in the footer.
  • JQuery can be loaded from Google.
  • Javascript should not write inline CSS.
  • Yeoman and Gulp should be used to construct the primary frontend toolsets

CSS

  • CSS should be loaded in the header in external files.
  • CSS should be preprocessed from SCSS.
  • A Classless asymmetric grid system should be used to create responsive columns.

Images

  • Transparent pngs should be avoided.
  • Images should always be compressed as well as possible.
  • Larger images should be resized to fit the size of the device.

Fonts

  • FOUT should be dealt with using the responsive typography method championed by Jason Pamental.
  • Google webfont loader should not be used.
  • Custom fonts should be used in limited amounts.
  • Custom fonts should be less than 50kb each.

Responsive Features

  • Responsive customizations should be accomplished in JavaScript and be fully cachable by Varnish.

Code

  • Code should never go into the database inside eval functions.
  • Code should be separated into discrete modules based on function, not content type.
  • There should be more than one feature.
  • All source code should follow Drupal coding standards.
  • TODOs should be marked with TODO.

Source Control

  • Remote hosted git should be used to manage all source code.
  • Gitflow should be used to manage git branches.
  • Production sites should run off of a different branch than development.

Cookies

  • LocalStorage should be used instead of cookies.

Deploying

  • Development servers should deploy automatically on a push to the master branch.
  • Production servers should be deployed from the production branch using git pull or a deployment tool.
  • Database changes should be deployed with Features.

Performance

  • Sites should load in under 1 second from the nearest data center on Pingdom performance test.
  • Pages should not exceed 1 MB.
  • Pages should not exceed 100 requests.

Web Hosting

  • Web hosting should make use of a globally distributed CDN.
  • PHP 5.5 should be used.
  • OPcache should be enabled for PHP with at least 64 MB of memory.
  • A cache should be used such as APCu for single web servers or memcache for multiple.
  • All websites should be behind a Varnish server.
  • Solr should be hosted on a dedicated Tomcat server
  • The latest stable MariaDB should be used as a database server.
  • If apache is used, it should use mod-php and have AllowOverrides off.
  • Drupal should only have permission to write to /tmp/* and sites/default/files/*
  • Servers will be monitored for uptime and load.
  • All servers will have image backups daily and weekly.
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