Its not the sexiest part of the web, but maintenance is important for all sites. Do you know which ways to build your Drupal site to minimise effort for the long term? Are you making it harder than it has to be to maintain your Drupal site(s)?

Maintaining a Drupal website isn’t necessarily the difficult task it used to be. There are all kinds of tools available to help you get the job done, and plenty of advice out there that will help you on your way. However, by the same token, this knowledge has become increasingly specialised, and can sometimes seem so arcane you sometimes wonder if you’ve become a systems administrator by mistake.

In this presentation, we’ll aim at making it easier to maintain your Drupal site(s) and demystifying the process, and detail a few best practice strategies you can use on a consistent basis to get the job done. We’ll cover:

• Command line tools that assist easy maintenance,
• Best practices for version control and release management,
• Scripting your maintenance
• and testing to ensure that all your site’s major tasks still work as intended.

We’ll discuss ways that you can build your sites to be easier to maintain including pros and cons of different approaches. Moreover, we’ll give you the details of tried and tested maintenance strategies, and provide wisdom obtained from the experience of maintaining a wide variety of Drupal sites, both new and old.