Transparent Site Building and Architecture

Node, user, term, flag, field, view, block, format. Drupal's nouns are highly configurable, and as a result, easily misused. Site builders create sloppy architecture when they fail to focus on the semantic use of the building blocks. Other sites become a mess organically, as several admins add another role, another vocabulary, another content type, module, workflow, one by one. Bad decisions (or the lack of decision) at the site architecture level are difficult to undo, and often undermine the quality and usability of a site for its entire lifetime.

This session will look at good and bad examples of translating a site's requirements into a Drupal structure. We'll focus on common mistakes and how to prevent them. We'll learn approaches for rescuing production sites with botched architecture including:

• Reorganizing content types and fields
• Weening 'content' from the dreaded PHP format
• Ending the block administration page from hell
• Wiggling out of a node access nightmare
• Freeing a theme from excess template files
• Healing an abused database
• Site cleanups as part of version upgrades