[webteam] radical simplicity

[James Walker]

On 12-May-08, at 5:31 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

> On 05/12/2008 3:00 PM, Florian Jensen wrote:
>
>> I agree, that it would be a pity to go back to a static page.
>> Especially, after all the work that has been put into the new  
>> website.
>
> Sunk costs. Get over it. :)
>
>> I
>> say, we speed up the development of our Drupal 6 site, hoping that  
>> all
>> the problems we had are fixed in the modules.
>
> Well, the problems this morning were caused by "upgrading" to a Date
> module in Drupal 5. The fact that released software caused such a
> serious problem does not inspire confidence.

I understand the frustration, and sadly - in contributed modules,  
there is a wide variety of quality and sometimes software is released  
with bugs still in it (*gasp* imagine that!).

This, however, is *easily* preventable by following some simple best  
practices (and these aren't Drupal specific).

* Test things first - have a staging server or a local development  
environment. Did the code ever make it into svn? is there somewhere/ 
someway I can easily replicate jabber.org to test and diagnose?

* Limit the # of people with administrator access to the site -  
develop some ways to work together as a team - keep a log of changes,  
or - again - have a staging process.

* Error reporting is good and helpful in development/testing - but do  
full error reporting in production isn't necessary. Turn it off.

--
James Walker :: http://walkah.net/ :: xmpp:walkah at walkah.net