http://www.drupalalpeadria.org/session/distribution-best-practices

1. Distribution best practices
Bojan Zivanovic (bojanz)
13.04.2013

2. Bojan Živanović (bojanz)
- Developer from Serbia
Projects: Drupal Commerce, Views,
Views Bulk Operations, Inline Entity Form, etc.
Lead developer of Commerce Kickstart v2.

3. Commerce Guys is the
COMPANY
Based in
Paris, France
Ann Arbor, Michigan
London, UK

4. Meanwhile, in 2006...

5. Commerce Kickstart v2
• Mobile-ready responsive design
• Enhanced product marketing (image zooms, fancy
attributes, slideshows)
• Faceted product search
• Streamlined administration
• Built-in payment gateways, analytics

6. Panopoly
• Mobile-ready responsive design
• Panels powered
• In-Place Page Building
• Faceted search
• Streamlined administration
• Apps powered

7. Drupal Commons
• Mobile-ready responsive design
• Community building tools
• Blogs, discussions, documents, wikis, events
• Activity streams
• Faceted search
• Streamlined administration

8. Expectations from a distribution

Responsive frontend theme

Improved admin experience

Facetted search

Batteries included

Demo content

9. Basic concepts and
problems

10. Distribution building blocks
1) Install profile
2) Drush make
3) Features
4) Demo content

11. Installation profile
- The heart of a Drupal installation
- Enables the basic (or not so basic)
set of modules, sets the default theme
- Can add any number of pages and tasks
to the installer, and alter its appeariance
- Can implement hooks

12. Drush Make

13. Features – the promise

14. Features – the promise

15. Features – reality

Can't depend one on another.

Not uninstallable.

Not interoperable (across distributions)

Not optimized for “default configuration”.

What to do about default content?

16. Default configuration

Installed initially, restorable.

Modifiable by the user (everything can be

deleted, export not marked as “overridden”)

Possible solution:

http://drupal.org/project/defaultconfig

17. Default content

Easy to create / import, easy to remove.
 http://drupal.org/project/defaultcontent
deprecated in favor of “”UID Features”

DIY?

Migrate

18. Community problems

Dealing with (nearly) abandoned projects.

Dealing with patches

Dealing with old releases

19. Handling updates

Distributions need to be updated as a whole

Hide update status for included projects

The need for more frequent releases

Security updates need to be fast ( < 48h).

20. Support and maintenance

- Get off your island.

- Separate bug reports from the support requests

- Send the support requests to StackExchange

- Send any relevant bug reports to contribs

- How can we keep this sustainable?

21. Sustainability
- Distributions are expensive
- Currently mostly a lead generation tool.
- Low usage:
Drupal core installs: 869 852
Commerce Kickstart installs: 7 041
Next 10 distributions combined: 4300
Distributions make up 1.2% of all Drupal installs
- App stores?

22. Sustainability

23. Sustainability

24. Diving in

25. Customizing the install process

Theme it!

Hide redundant pages

Custom pages for additional configuration

Additional tasks for creating demo content,

enabling additional modules.

Post-installation help

26. Customizing the install process

27. Customizing the install process

28. Customizing the install process

29. Customizing the install process

30. Customizing the install process

31. Fixing the admin UX

Don't be afraid to create a custom theme

Or use ours: Shiny

Views & VBO for all listings (admin_views)

Date

Chosen / Select2

Module Filter

Backport, Special Menu Admin

32. Facetted search

33. Responsive design

Being responsive is no longer optional.

Start with a base theme:
- Omega (Commerce Kickstart, Recruiter)
- Adaptivetheme (Commons)

- Zen

- Admin pages are not responsive
http://drupal.org/project/navbar
http://drupal.org/project/responsive_tables

34. Panels

Are you using it today?

Different layouts for different pages

Responsive layouts

In-place page building

Layouts for forms too (node add / edit)

Used by most distributions
(Panopoly, Commons, Recruiter, Nodestream..)

35. Other

Emails and activity streams
- Message & Message Notify

Breadcrumbs:
- Crumbs
- Path Breadcrumbs

Social links and logins:

- Service Links, Sharethis
- OAuth Connector

36. Now go and build
something

37. Questions & Answers

38. Thank you!
bojan@commerceguys.com