GSB Best Practices

A place to document our standard operating procedures.

Git

• Commit early, commit often.
• If you are working on a task that has an associated Jira ticket, please create a branch for the issue using the issue number as the name of the branch, for example, WP-100.
• Prefix your commits with the ticket number.
• Never prefix your commits with a # sign, this can cause the commit to be lost during rebase.
• Use git add -p to stage individual hunks, and use git diff --staged to review before committing.

Dev environment

Drush

• Use the 6.x branch of drush from github

Ruby

• Use ruby-install and chruby to manage ruby versions.
• Use bundler to manage rubygem versions.

Drupal

Site building

• Use Display Suite when possible to alter the display of content

Theming

• Avoid use of template (.tpl.php) files whenever possible
  • When overriding a template file, copy the original and rename as appropriate, and then commit it. Make the actual changes to the file in a separate commit.
• Favor preprocess hooks over theme functions over template files.

Module dev

• Use entity_metadata_wrapper() whenever accessing field values on an entity.
• Use hook_ENTITYTYPE_view() and hook_field_extra_fields() to add non-field data to an entity
• Prefer hook_ENTITYTYPE_view_alter() over hook_entity_view_alter() if only one entity type is expected.
• Prefer custom field formatters over custom alters when possible.