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.