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Jul 30 2020
Jul 30

argument-open-source Over 500,000 businesses leverage Drupal to launch their websites and projects. From NASA to Tesla, public and private institutions regularly rely on Drupal to launch large-scale websites capable of handling their development and visual needs. But, starting a Drupal project doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, 14% of all IT projects outright fail, 43% exceed their initial budgets, and 31% fail to meet their original goals! In other words, if you want to create a successful Drupal project, you need to prepare. Don’t worry! We’ve got your back. Here are 5 things to keep in mind when starting a Drupal-based project.

1. GATHER REQUIREMENTS FROM STAKEHOLDERS EARLY AND OFTEN

According to PMI, 39% of projects fail due to inadequate requirements. Believe it or not, requirement gathering is the single most important stage of project development. In fact, it’s the first step Drupal itself takes when pushing out new projects (see this scope document for their technical document project). Gathering requirements may sound easy, but it can be a time-consuming process. We recommend using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed Upon, Realistic, Time-based) to map out your specific needs. If possible, involve the end-user during this stage. Don’t assume you know what users want; ask them directly. Internally, requirements gathering should rally nearly every stakeholder with hefty amounts of cross-collaboration between departments. You want to lean heavily on data, establish your benchmarks and KPIs early, and try to involve everyone regularly. The single biggest project mistake is acting like requirements are set-in-stone. If you just follow the initial requirements to a “T,” you may push out a poor project. You want to regularly ask questions, communicate issues, and rely on guidance from stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) to guide your project to completion.

2. PLAN YOUR SDLC/WORKFLOW PIPELINE

We all have different development strategies. You may leverage freelancers, a best-in-class agency, or internal devs to execute your Drupal projects. Typically, we see a combination of two of the above. Either way, you have to set some software development lifecycle and workflow standards. This gets complex. On the surface, you should think about coding standards, code flow, databases, and repositories, and all of the other development needs that should be in sync across devs. But there’s also the deeper, more holistic components to consider. Are you going to use agile? Do you have a DevOps strategy? Are you SCRUM-based? Do you practice design and dev sprints? At Mobomo, we use an agile-hybrid development cycle to fail early, iterate regularly, and deploy rapidly. But that’s how we do things. You need to figure out how you want to execute your project. We’ve seen successful Drupal projects using virtually every workflow system out there. The way you work matters, sure. But getting everyone aligned under a specific way of working is more important. You can use the “old-school” waterfall methodology and still push out great projects. However, to do that, you need everyone on the same page.

3. USE SHIFT-LEFT TESTING FOR BUG AND VULNERABILITY DETECTION

Drupal is a secure platform. Of the four most popular content management systems, Drupal is the least hacked. But that doesn’t mean it’s impenetrable. You want to shift-left test (i.e., automate testing early and often in the development cycle). Drupal 8+ has PHPUnit built-in — taking the place of SimpleTest. You can use this to quickly test out code. You can perform unit tests, kernel tests, and functional tests with and without JavaScript. You can also use Nightwatch.js to run tests. Of course, you may opt for third-party automation solutions (e.g., RUM, synthetic user monitoring, etc.) The important thing is that you test continuously. There are three primary reasons that shift-left testing needs to be part of your development arsenal.

  • It helps prevent vulnerabilities. The average cost of a data breach is over $3 million. And it takes around 300 days to identify and contain website breaches.
  • It bolsters the user experience. A 100-millisecond delay in page load speed drops conversions by 7%. Meanwhile, 75% of users judge your credibility by your website’s design and performance, and 39% of users will stop engaging with your website if your images take too long to load. In other words, simple glitches can result in massive issues.
  • It reduces development headaches. Nothing is worse than developing out completely new features only to discover an error that takes you back to step 1.

4. GET HYPER-FAMILIAR WITH DRUPAL’S API

If you want to build amazing Drupal projects, you need to familiarize yourself with the Drupal REST API. This may sound like obvious advice. But understanding how Drupal’s built-in features, architecture, and coding flow can help you minimize mistakes and maximize your time-to-launch. The last thing you want to do is code redundantly when Drupal may automate some of that coding on its end. For more information on Drupal’s API and taxonomy, see Drupal API. We know! If you’re using Drupal, you probably have a decent idea of what its API looks like. But make sure that you understand all of its core features to avoid headaches and redundancies.

5. SET STANDARDS

Every development project needs standards. There are a million ways to build a website or app. But you can’t use all of those million ways together. You don’t want half of your team using Drupal’s built-in content builder and the other half using Gutenberg. Everyone should be on the same page. This goes for blocks, taxonomy, and every other coding need and task you’re going to accomplish. You need coding standards, software standards, and process standards to align your team to a specific framework. You can develop standards incrementally, but they should be shared consistently across teams. Ideally, you’ll build a standard for everything. From communication to development, testing, launching, and patching, you should have set-in-stone processes. In the past, this was less of an issue. But, with every developer rushing to agile, sprint-driven methodologies, it can be easy to lose sight of standards in favor of speed. Don’t let that happen. Agile doesn’t mean “willy-nilly” coding and development for the fastest possible launch. It still has to be systematic. Standards allow you to execute faster and smarter across your development pipeline.

NEED SOME HELP?

At Mobomo, we build best-in-class Drupal projects for brands across the globe. From NASA to UGS, we’ve helped private, and public entities launch safe, secure, and exciting Drupal solutions. Are you looking for a partner with fresh strategies and best-of-breed agile-driven development practices?

Contact us. Let’s build your dream project — together.

Jul 28 2020
Jul 28

argument-open-source

DRUPAL MIGRATION PREPARATION AUDIT

All good things must come to an end. Drupal 7 will soon meet its end. Does your organization have your migration plan to Drupal 9 in order? Here’s what you need to know to keep your Drupal site running and supported. Talk to Our Drupal Migration Experts Now!

OUR APPROUCH TO DRUPAL MIGRATION.

  • Analyze 
  • Inventory
  • Migration
  • Revision
  • SEO

OVERVIEW

Staying up to date with Drupal versions is vital to maintaining performance to your site:

  • Future-proofing
  • Avoiding the end-of-life cut-off
  • Performance
  • Security

GOALS

  1. Catalog existing community contributed modules necessary to the project
  • Do these modules have a corresponding Drupal 8 version?
  • If the answer to the above question is no, is there an alternative?
  • Is there an opportunity to optimize or upgrade the site’s usage of contributed modules?
  1. Catalog existing custom built modules
  • Do these modules rely on community contributed modules that may not have a migration path to Drupal 8?
  • Do these modules contain deprecated function calls?
  • Are there any newer community contributed modules that may replace the functionality of the custom modules?
  1. Review existing content models.
  • How complex is the content currently—field, taxonomy, media?
  • What specific integrations need to be researched so content will have feature parity?
  1. Catalog and examine 3rd party integrations.
  • Is there any kind of e-commerce involved?
  • Do these 3rd party integrations have any Drupal 8 community modules?
  1. Catalog User roles and permissions
  • Do user accounts use any type of SSO?
  • Is there an opportunity to update permissions and clean up roles?

PRE-AUDIT REQUIREMENTS

  • Access to the codebase
  • Access to the database
  • Access to a live environment (optional)
  • Access to integrations in order to evaluate level of effort

DELIVERABLES

Module Report The module report should contain an outline of the existing Drupal 7 modules with the corresponding path to Drupal 8, whether that’s an upgraded version of the existing module or a similar module. This report should also contain a sheet outlining any deprecated function usage for the custom modules that will need to be ported to Drupal 8.

Content Model Report The Content Model report should contain an overview of the existing site’s content types, users, roles, permissions and taxonomic vocabularies with each field given special consideration. Recommendations should be made in the report to improve the model when migrating to Drupal 8.

Integration Report The integration report contains a catalog of the third party integrations currently in use and marks those with an existing contributed module from the community and those that will require custom work to integrate with the Drupal 8 system.

Our Insights on Drupal Our latest thoughts, musings and successes.

Contact us. We’ll help you expand your reach.

Mar 20 2020
Mar 20

On June 24, 2020 Drupal.org announced that Drupal 7’s end of life has been extended until November 2023 because of the impact of COVID-19 on budgets and capacity. This article still remains relevant — but please note that the dates have been pushed back a year

If you have a Drupal 7 website, you might have already heard that the official end-of-life date for Drupal 7 has been officially set for November 2021. Many organizations should upgrade their Drupal 7 sites before then. But that might not be required. Here’s how you figure out what you need to do.

“What does Drupal 7 end-of-life mean?”

First let’s talk about what EOL means for Drupal. The main thing is security updates. 

Drupal has a highly regarded security team who manage security for both core Drupal and thousands of public modules, themes and distributions that add additional features. When a security problem is found with Drupal core, the team fixes the problem and publishes advisories that explain vulnerabilities, along with steps to mitigate them. All of this is contributed publicly and freely, just like you would expect from open source software. 

The security team supports versions of Drupal until they reach their end-of-life. 

But after the EOL, the baton is passed along to an Extended Security Support team. This team is composed of pre-vetted Drupal agencies, and they are commercially funded by those clients who want to pay for the extended security support. They are mandated to publicly release fixes for most of the security vulnerabilities that they find. 

“Hold on. What level of security support do I need?”

Before we talk about what you should do about D7 EOL, you first need to think about how important security is for your website.

  • Are there people who are actively trying to attack your website (maybe because of your strong stance on a particular issue)?
  • Does your website process commercial transactions? (Most non-profit websites these days use third-party websites to process donations and event registrations.)
  • Does your website collect a lot of personally identifiable information (PII)? This relates back to the first point: if there’s lots of valuable PII, an attacker will be more interested in trying to steal it. 

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then security is of extra importance for you.

“I won’t have the budget for a big website rebuild before November 2021” 

It’s going to be okay, we’ve got a few options for you. You’ll fall into one of the following categories:

1. “Security is really important for our website, we need Extended Security Support”

Regardless of whether you are an existing client, or someone we’ve never worked with before, please reach out to us and let us know if we can help.

2. “Security is just as important to our website as it is for every other website, but not in an extra special way”

If your website does not have a reason for someone to actively try to attack it, then you only need to be guarded from publicly known security vulnerabilities. That way, you’re protected against the automated attacks that hit every website. Typically those kinds of automated attacks are either trying to use your web servers to mine bitcoin, or lock up your website and demand a ransom. 

When Drupal 6 reached end-of-life in 2016 we continued to support our Drupal 6 clients using the publicly released updates from the Extended Security Support team. Our last Drupal 6 client just got a new website a few months ago! 

We’ll do the same when Drupal 7 reaches end-of-life. When a Drupal 7 update is released, we’ll update your website, just like we already do for all of our Drupal and WordPress support and maintenance clients.

3. “Help, I have no idea what I need!”

No problem. We can help here too. Regardless of where you’re at — or where you’re going next — we’re here to help. Drop us a line.

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Dec 06 2019
Dec 06

You may have read our previous articles about how to plan for Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 End-of-Life. The important thing to know is that the Drupal 8 End-of-Life is nothing like those. In fact, “End of Life” is completely the wrong idea. Instead, it’s more like one of those spa treatments where you get a full body scrub to get rid of the dead skin cells. You walk out feeling rejuvenated and refreshed. 

Drupal 9 — Same as Drupal 8, But Without The Old Stuff

Drupal release timeline

In each new minor version of Drupal 8 there are some new features, and some old code is marked as “deprecated” (that just means that it’s time to stop using this, because it’s going to go away some day). After nine minor versions over almost five years, there’s now an accumulation of deprecated code. This deprecated code is like those dead skin cells that you go to the spa to get rid of.  So Drupal 9.0 will be the same as Drupal 8.9, just without the deprecated code. The two might even be released at the same time. 

Then, in Drupal 9.1, we see the cycle starting again: some new features, and some old code is marked as deprecated.

Don’t Rely on Deprecated Code

In the graphic above, you’ll notice that 8.9 does not have any more deprecated code than 8.8. That means that once a website is upgraded to 8.8, we can then start the process of ensuring that the site isn’t using any deprecated code. 

If you are an Advomatic client, we’ll create a ticket in your queue to clean out all uses of deprecated code. In fact, if you’ve done a project with us recently, we’ve already started doing this as part of the Q/A process in our two-week sprints. 

A Window of Almost Two Years for This Cleanup

Drupal timeline by quarters

This is the timeline for the next several versions of Drupal.  We’ve got about 2 years to make this change — more than enough time. 

Alternating Minor Versions

We handle all the technical stuff for you. But the purpose of the website is not for us to have a technical toy to play with, it’s to advance the mission of your non-profit. So we want to devote most of our time and effort towards your web strategy. While we could upgrade your website to the newest version every six months, it’s not the best use of your money or time. So we alternate versions. That means that your Drupal 8 website is either always on an even minor version, or an odd minor version. 

We’ll likely continue that pattern as we cross the threshold into Drupal 9. That means that this process could be delayed by 6 months from what you see here.

Flipping the Switch

Once we’ve cleaned up all the deprecated code, then we’re ready to upgrade the site to Drupal 9.  Remember: this is nothing like past major upgrades in Drupal. Instead it’s just like the minor upgrades from Drupal 8.6 → 8.7 → 8.8 etc.

Conclusion

The key takeaway is that this whole process should be almost seamless. We’ll create a few tickets in the queue to prep for the upgrade, and then for the upgrade itself.  But the majority of our time will still be spent on advancing your mission. Over the years to come the website content and its presentation will be able to continually evolve, all without a costly major upgrade. 

Thanks to Amanda Luker for the charts!

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web