[WebPub] The Drupal development environment

[Ed Carlevale]

Hello,

I decided to refocus my presentation today on the Drupal development environment. I was originally going to discuss standardizing your development environment on a single platform using your own Drupal distribution. But it occurs to me that I need to start with the development environment itself. What makes Drupal powerful is the open source community writing code for it. And that's exactly what presents the challenges. A typical site has 250+ contributed modules. You need an environment that gives you a development, test, and live version of your site, so that all your changes happen on the development site before being sent to the live site. Pantheon gets this exactly right, and their Pantheon One platform takes this to a whole new level. Berkeley is going to be rolling out 600 sites on it, and Stanford already has major programs and centers on it. I'm convinced that Pantheon One will become the standard going forward in high-end academic development and I want to see it take hold at MIT now, rather than a year from now, for the same reason that any PI wants the best equipment in his or her lab, because it makes better work possible.

Another piece of this argument is that you can't work effectively alone in a silo. Not just because you'll eventualy run into problems you'll need another person's help with. The reason is because web development evolves so quickly that you can easily be using obsolete approaches, or not preparing yourselves adequately for the changes coming along with Drupal 8, which are going to be significant. Boston is ground zero for leaders in the Drupal community, and MIT, because the monthly meetups of the Boston Drupal Group happen here, has a key role to play as well. 

So, getting back to the development environment: if you register on Pantheon and send me an email, I can give you admin access to the 10 or so MIT Dx sites I've set up there. And you can set up several sites of your own. I'll cover this at the presentation today. You can use your sites to recreate versions of your MIT sites, so that you can recreate problems you may be having and explore various solutions. And you can look at the other sites to see all the different things a website can be doing.

Finally, if you can't make it to my presentation today at noon  I urge you to come to Matt Cheney's presentation at MIT tomorrow evening  It's a unique experience watching the developer who built the platform working on it -- the pieces seem to fit together especially well.

Regards,
Ed Carlevale
Drupal Developer and Site Maintainer
	http://ebics.net
	http://mitenergyclub.org
	http://drupalgroup.mit.edu



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