Simplicity, Abstraction, and the Modern Website: Deployment Checklist

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Below are some reference materials to supplement the Simplicity, Abstraction, and the Modern Website presentation that I gave at DrupalCampATL 2015 and the USG Board of Regents Annual Computing Conference at Rock Eagle 2015.

• Minimize unnecessary user access to the site

  • Remove admin privileges from all but select few who need them in production
  • Remove test users (and any old users) who no longer need access
  • Disable user account creation if not needed -- this is on by default in Drupal!
  • Prune out unnecessary content/data nodes/objects (test pages, duplicates, etc.)
    • Use a content listing tool to review all system content in small manageable chunks

• Validate the modules / plugins / themes being used - remove any that aren't necessary

  • Don't just disable these add-ons -- delete them completely so they can't be turned on by accident!
  • Disable devel modules and move to a private directory for extra security

• Remove extraneous files from the filesystem

  • Module and library archive (tarball) files
  • Any other archive files (e.g. content files copied from other systems)
  • Test data files / SQL dumps / etc.

• Remove menus and blocks that never ended up being used

• Remove content types and taxonomies (Drupal) that never ended up being used

• Turn on caching! Turn on caching! Turn on caching!

  • Not just page caching, but CSS and JS caching as well.