Best practices, workflow and how not to break your site

On Friday August 23rd, I was part of a contingent of Acquia employees attending a Drupal conference in my current home city of Canberra.

DrupalGov Canberra was a day long event with speakers and attendees from all over Australia. With Drupal already having a strong foothold in the private sector as the go-to CMS/CMF for driving some of the most popular, highly trafficked sites online, and the US government already seeing a lot of exposure to Drupal it's only natural the Australian government would want in!

The aim of the conference was to introduce CIOs, web managers and government development teams that Drupal is both applicable for government use, as well as having a great community of companies and users to back the software and experience up.

On presenting

I was given the privilege of presenting a talk at the event and decided to discuss 'Best Practices and Workflow' within a Drupal development environment which is something I've grown to respect and advocate. Throughout my learning of Drupal, I have simultaneously picked up knowledge of good developmental workflow and tips for not breaking Drupal. It's an easy decision to quickly make a hacky change on production, but by introducing good workflow and using tools like git and drush it becomes easier to do things the right way.

I've made my presentation available online from Google Drive, or as a PDF download although it may not make a lot of sense without me talking on top of it. With this in mind, I've written up a summary of my personal development environment, workflow and included a git/drush cheat sheet for use in your own teams.