Svn for version control

For each and every one of our projects, big and small, we employ SVN version control. As a result, we can successfully manage projects with our large team of developers and incorporate outside developers into our client-facing operations. Although we are aware that there are other version control systems with greater functionality available (Bazaar, Git), we chose SVN due to its comparatively low complexity and widespread familiarity among our developers, designers, and clients.

Trac for bug tracking and code history

With every site we launch, we also supply a separate installation of Trac to complement SVN. We may view a chronology of our SVN changes and obtain visual comparisons between versions thanks to this open source application. This is useful for tracking down potential issues (if a module was broken on Friday, what modifications were made to it on Wednesday and Thursday?) and for auditing specific sections of code (what happened and when). We utilize our project management Drupal instance to administer our HTTP authentication for Trac in order to manage our credentials between Trac instances.

Drush

Beyond module management, Drush is a venerable Swiss Army Knife of Drupal functionality that enables a developer to log into the MySQL database directly using the credentials the Drupal installation uses (drush sql cli), runs cron (drush cron), executes any pending database updates (drush updatedb), and much more. Drush's capability may be easily expanded, which has shown to be quite useful when performing significant data imports and exports. Overall, the command line (which is no longer even a module!) has become the focal point of all of this capability, which is extremely powerful and essential to our development process.

Devel Drupal For Firebug, Coder, ET AL: Drupal Development Modules

Numerous helpful developer modules have been created for Drupal as a platform for developers. Several of them will be used in each particular development project at Chapter Three, but usually every project ends up installing a few modules. They consist of:

Devel Module

This is the de facto standard for a Drupal development module and it comes with crucial features for creating test content, conducting performance testing, looking at SQL queries, creating forms, switching user accounts, figuring out how to use themes, dumping variables using the Krumo debug tool, and much more. We utilize it across all of our sites, and it should certainly go by the name "Devel Suite."

Drupal for Firebug

For those who currently use Firebug on a regular basis, this module and its related Firefox extension offer an outstanding Drupal developer experience.

Drupal for Firebug provides a new tab for "Drupal" by using a good amount of XUL magic to hook into the Firebug tabs. It slows down the loading of each page's nodes, users, views, and forms while also offering sensible coloring to show what has been added, altered, or removed. The firep() function makes it simple to output personalized debugging messages and have them appear in the general messages in the order they were executed. Since I built the module and extension to aid in Chapter Three's development process, it has received about 100,000 downloads and is now extensively used.

Coder

This module helps you create better code, but it also makes sure that every line of code you write follows Drupal best practices. We use this on a lot of our code, and it makes it easier to uncover clear security flaws, spot PHP errors, and enforce complete comments. Beginning very soon, all of our SVN commits will be checked for quality code structure against the rules of the coder module.

There are hundreds of more developer modules, like Deadwood for converting D5 to D6 modules and Masquerade for user testing. Depending on the needs of the project or the client, we employ these modules in various scenarios.

Xdebug

The Xdebug debugging package gives our developers access to stack and function traces, which they can use to identify PHP issues. Being a sophisticated application, Drupal frequently has mistakes that happen several levels deep in the Drupal architecture, therefore being able to trace back and identify the exact location of the original issue might be crucial to effectively tracking down a problem. The functionality that Xdebug offers is crucial in particular when PHP reports a technical error in a standard function, such as node load(), yet the actual cause of the issue is in a preceding function. The Xdebug backtrace greatly improves our development process' efficiency.

Simpletest and Simpletest and Selenium - Automatic Testing

It takes several different processes to ensure that we produce high quality products that are free of serious bugs. Implementing automatic testing at the functional and user experience levels (using Simpletest) is a component of our approach (via Selenium). Automatic testing has received a lot of attention (and for good reason), but the Simpletest donated module for Drupal 6 offers a lot of the same capabilities.

We incorporate this module into all of our significant development projects, along with bespoke tests we create on a case-by-case basis, and use the Simpletest framework to guarantee crucial functionality at every stage of our work. Early identification of the functionality and critical routes for each project as well as the integration of the tests required to support them are key components of our development strategy. Critical PHP and SQL functionality is successfully tested at the code level thanks to the Simpletest feature. Since a web application consists of more than simply PHP and SQL, we employ the Selenium testing tool to check the quality of the user experience side of things. This testing aids in finding errors that a Simpletest framework alone is unable to find, such as broken JavaScript or forms concealed by CSS difficulties. The easiest approach to create Selenium tests is to utilize the Firefox plugin for Selenium, which lets you record a macro of user behaviour and have it automatically play it back in a variety of browsers. In this method, we can consistently test every "user scenario" in various scenarios to guarantee essential site operation.