Summary

Successful Drupal practitioners know how to effectively maintain Drupal applications. Performing maintenance with best practices and doing so routinely helps ensure Drupal applications continue to run well, are secure, and get the benefit of ongoing features and fixes furnished by the community. Applications must run on a well-maintained platform as well, which includes updates to PHP, MySQL, and operating systems. Maintenance of Drupal requires an effective code deployment strategy and an understanding of all parts of Drupal’s architecture (code, content, files, and configuration). Leveraging tools such as Composer and Drush provides code-base management and helps to perform automation. Finally, best practices exist by reviewing product life cycles, having backup strategies, harnessing managed services for hosting, Git, CDN, and update checkers, and adhering to environment-level differences. The next chapter explores Drupal features around content structures and language...