April 7, 2014

This session was presented at Stanford Drupal Camp 2014.

When a lot of Drupal developers first approach a site they often have a particular distribution, set of modules, or approach in mind. Every site starts to look like the perfect candidate for your particular variety of Swiss army knife.

With over twenty thousand modules and dozens of distributions to choose from the total number of possible solutions for a site approaches the exponential.

I propose we take a step back and approach projects with these type of questions:

1. Is Drupal a good fit for this project?
2. How can we meet our requirements in the simplest way possible?
3. What high quality existing solutions in Drupal already meet my needs?
4. How easy will our proposed solution be to maintain?

It is easy to fall into the trap of shopping for modules and seeing available modules as 'free' features for your site. We should start by looking for what we can cut rather than what we can add to a site.

This type of approach produces smaller more-maintainable sites that are still chugging along six months after launch.

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