Development

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business we manage a website that has a lot of different functionality.  It was important that when we migrated from our old platform that we were able to compartementalize the functionality into maintainable pieces.  By leveraging install profiles and Features we are able to accomplish this and we are able to better understand where to fix bugs when problems arise.  This talk will go over how we have designed our development workflow and lessons we have learned that could improve it.

Beep beep!

During the development process, your site goes through many changes as you figure out which modules to use, solidify your content types and views, configure features, and deal with bugs in core, community and custom modules. Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened. This is even more likely with a larger development team and when development is going fast.

Community Academic Profiles (CAP) is a system developed by Stanford as a way of consolidating faculty information into a single location. Beyond basic personal profiles, the system also collects information about publications, research and academic interests, presenting a rich and comprehensive view of the academic community and their pursuits.

Want to make sure your Drupal site is accessible to everyone? Learn to maximize the accessibility features built into Drupal - and the additional features built into Open Framework and Stanford Sites - and assure those features stay intact when you make changes. See the value of testing keyboard navigation and focus, adding alternative text to images, and assuring that assistive technology presents page content in the order you expect.

Launches are tough on a new developer. Everyone remembers the lump in their throats around launch time; the rush to finish content, make final theme tweaks, adjust for sudden browser weirdness. As momentum picks up, the odd change request always appears, databases are slingshot hither and yon, while everyone scrambles to resolve merge conflicts like a Tokyo train at rush hour.

Last year, the Stanford Alumni Association began a series of events to connect Stanford Alumni around the world with a rich and engaging program, including informal Q&A sessions with President Hennessy, micro-lectures, collaborative seminars, and an extensive interactive component. The website for this series of events began with the most basic needs of event registration, and evolved over time into a highly customized experience that mirrors these unique events.

Maybe you're a Drupal site-builder or frontend developer looking to get into Drupal backend development, or perhaps you're already a PHP developer and looking to get familiar with Drupal. If so, this session is for you.

Overview

Instead of the first obligatory "Hello World" example code, we will create a new Drupal 7 module that improves the UI of a popular contrib module.

Drupal has a module called SimpleTest for setting up automated tests. Despite its name it is not simple to use effectively. This sessions aims to remove some of the mystery around SimpleTest and Unit Testing in general.

I will start by introducing the concepts of automated testing frameworks and how to get started with SimpleTest.

I will then cover solutions to the three big problems people tend to have with SimpleTest in Drupal 7:

John Bickar and Marco Wise from Stanford IT Services will facilitate a roundtable discussion among web developers, to share tips, tools, tricks, and best practices. Attend this session to learn and share about:

• Git
• Drush
• IDEs
• Development and staging workflows
• Best practices

We speak PHP, MySQL, bash, tcsh, and mod_rewrite here.

Drupal 8 is coming soon (well, when it’s ready ;) Drupal 7 is mature and has some years in it left. But, there are plenty of Drupal 6 and, gasp, Drupal 5 (and maybe even Drupal 4) sites out in the wild.