We have a new web site! It's running Drupal 7!
We've been talking about it for years, and we're proud of the new dtek.net, released just in time for DrupalCon in Chicago. Our initial push included a brand refresh and the basic site build: migrating to Drupal 7 from WordPress, architecting and developing the new site. The next step will be to draw out the new brand into a more fully-realized business identity and Drupal 7 theme for the web site.
There's plenty to say about each of these steps, so this is the first of a few posts about all of our recent changes. In this post we just want to rave about the tools that make our new site possible: Drupal 7, Git, and Drush.
Drupal 7
It's big. It's bad-ass. It has an overlay.
Obviously we've been excited for the release of Drupal 7, and immediately jumped on it with our first D7 site: our own! It was only a matter of time for us to move to Drupal from our old custom/WordPress site, and the release of D7 along with DrupalCon and the version control changes discussed below provided the perfect storm for us to make it a reality.
First of all it's a joy to see fields and image-handling in core! And we know our clients will appreciate the huge set of improvements to the administrative side of Drupal thanks to the D7UX movement.
And the D7CX movement ensured there was a full set of contributed modules available the day D7 was released, avoiding the long wait for key modules like CCK and Views that followed the release of D6. Our site has modest functional requirements as far as Drupal goes, but we were able to build out exactly what we needed on day 1 of the Drupal 7 release. Spectacular.
Git + Drush
It's hard to remember the days before Drush. We've been using it steadily for a while, but are excited to make it a conerstone of our development and deployment process with, among many other features, its ability to download and update core and contrib sans any external package handler! Pair this with Drupal's move to Git, and we have a slick new workflow: with the new dtek.net Git + Drush has officially replaced our old workflow of Subversion on top of Drupal's CVS!
This workflow means a clean and easier-to-manage repository. (No more VCS meta tags scattered throughout the repo -- yeah!) And of course this is in addition to all of the standard advantages of Git like its speed, the ability to work offline, lack of a single point of failure, flexibility in workflow, and simpler branching and merging.
In short, this will let us work more efficiently, and we look forward to passing the joy on to our clients!
Enough gushing for now: stay tuned for posts about the WordPress to Drupal migration, and our forthcoming Drupal 7 theme (and DrupalCon!).
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