Maintaining is much less spoken about than building new sites. People often think of the initial deployment as the most glorious moment, but it doesn’t have to be. When a site is adequately maintained, then over time you can clear away impediments for users, can further lock down security on the site, and can build higher level functionality you didn’t have time for before the launch. You are in the perfecting stage.

Mainly for developers, I will cover…

• How to keep focus when you are no longer on a team of people and have to deal with monthly requirements gathering and executing on development and deployment.
• Adding to the Drupal site in such a way as would not compromise the architecture: Since you are doing one off fixes rather than broad changes that would force you to do architectural planning, you will have to stay vigilant in order for your site to be manageable by the person will eventually take your job of managing that site.
• Lessons on making dramatic changes to part of your site.
• Spicing up the inevitable tedium of managing user bugs that are thoroughly uninteresting, such as when two users out of a hundred cannot accomplish a task, and that require detective work just to, for example, get tabs to show up and permissions to be granted. Mind you, as time goes on and the easiest items get fixed, you will have to deal with the more difficult and more limited impact fixes.

Most of my time the past seven months has been spent maintaining a website that gets about ten million hits a year.

Presentation given by Anthony Glynn