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Better Drupal Building

• Custom glue should be accomplished with configuration first and PHP code second.

Configuration Management and Dependencies

• Use Composer (or Drush Make) to build your project and it's depencies.
• Store your work in files.
• Set your config directory above the webroot.
• Sync UUIDs across all developers.

Theming

• Frontend automation should use Gulp to automate tasks like livereload and sass.
• Yeoman should be used to generate project themes.
• SCSS syntax SASS should be used to generate CSS.
• Themes should apply to Drupal without using #id,content-type, block-id, or view-id in the source.
• Each theme should have reusable patterns rather than top down pages.
• Themes should use Blockify rather than hard coding blocks into templates.
• Single field, node, block, view PHP Templates should be avoided.

Editor Experience

• Content should be editable by the site editor without modifying code, css or complex configuration.
• Content should have an edit in place contextual gear.
• Content should not be defined in code.
• It should not require admin access to figure out how to edit content.
• The editor user should have links or a dashboard that links to “hidden” editor pages.
• Editors should be given the Clear Cache permission.
• CKeditor should be the JavaScript editor.
• Editors should be able to apply custom CSS via a drop down menu.
• Taxonomy can be used to apply additional page styles

Content

• Content should be a node.
• Taxonomy should categorize nodes. It should not store content.
• A site should have as few content types as reasonable (4 - 6 is a good goal).
• Content types should be singular
• Taxonomy vocabulary should be plural
• Field names should be singular or plural based on the number of values in the field.
• Fields should be reused when possible.

Blocks

• Context should be used to place blocks.
• Blocks should only be used sparingly. Consider creating a block view of a node marked by taxonomy instead.

Lists

• Lists should render the teaser view mode of content
• Custom displays should be accomplished by adding additional view modes.
• Content should be listed with views.
• Views should use the rendered entity format unless it’s impossible to do so.
• List should be ordered with draggable views.

Search

• Search boxes should not be labeled and they should contain HTML5 placeholder text.
• Search API should power site search. Core search should not be used.
• Search API should be powered by Solr or Elastic Search backend.
• Facets should be avoided in favor of views filters.
• All fields should be indexed including category names.
• Search should allow stemming, spelling correction and related searches.
• Current Search should not be used.

Breadcrumbs

• Breadcrumbs that don't match URL structure should be avoided.
• Easy Breadcrumbs module should be used to map URLs to breadcrumbs.

Permissions and Roles

• Editors should have permissions limited to the set of tasks they perform 80% of the time.
• Testing should be done as the editor user.

Caching

• Varnish should be used.
• Block Caching must be enabled.
• If users log in, then modules that disable block caching should not be used.
• Page cache should be on.
• Views Content Cache should be added and used on all views except random views.
• Random Views should be avoided. If used, they should be set to 30 minute time cache.
• Views Cache should be set to not expire.
• System cron should be run weekly to avoid resetting HTML page cache.

JavaScript

• JavaScript should be non-blocking and loaded in the footer.
• JQuery can be loaded from Google.
• Javascript should not write inline CSS.
• Yeoman and Gulp should be used to construct the primary frontend toolsets

CSS

• CSS should be loaded in the header in external files.
• CSS should be preprocessed from SCSS.
• A Classless asymmetric grid system should be used to create responsive columns.

Images

• Transparent pngs should be avoided.
• Images should always be compressed as well as possible.
• Larger images should be resized to fit the size of the device.

Fonts

• FOUT should be dealt with using the responsive typography method championed by Jason Pamental.
• Google webfont loader should not be used.
• Custom fonts should be used in limited amounts.
• Custom fonts should be less than 50kb each.

Responsive Features

• Responsive customizations should be accomplished in JavaScript and be fully cachable by Varnish.

Code

• Code should never go into the database inside eval functions.
• Code should be separated into discrete modules based on function, not content type.
• There should be more than one feature.
• All source code should follow Drupal coding standards.
• TODOs should be marked with TODO.

Source Control

• Remote hosted git should be used to manage all source code.
• Gitflow should be used to manage git branches.
• Production sites should run off of a different branch than development.

Cookies

• LocalStorage should be used instead of cookies.

Deploying

• Development servers should deploy automatically on a push to the master branch.
• Production servers should be deployed from the production branch using git pull or a deployment tool.
• Database changes should be deployed with Features.

Performance

• Sites should load in under 1 second from the nearest data center on Pingdom performance test.
• Pages should not exceed 1 MB.
• Pages should not exceed 100 requests.

Web Hosting

• Web hosting should make use of a globally distributed CDN.
• PHP 5.5 should be used.
• OPcache should be enabled for PHP with at least 64 MB of memory.
• A cache should be used such as APCu for single web servers or memcache for multiple.
• All websites should be behind a Varnish server.
• Solr should be hosted on a dedicated Tomcat server
• The latest stable MariaDB should be used as a database server.
• If apache is used, it should use mod-php and have AllowOverrides off.
• Drupal should only have permission to write to /tmp/* and sites/default/files/*
• Servers will be monitored for uptime and load.
• All servers will have image backups daily and weekly.