Episode 13: Development Workflow with Ethan Hinson

Show Takeaways

Drupal and WordPress can co-exist

Throw right into the fire and work it out as a group (for transitioning platforms)

Don’t have preconceived notions to which platform is best and let the client requirements decide which one will work out

We hung out with Ethan Hinson, Senior Architect from Blue Tent. Blue Tent started out as a Drupal shop however found some inefficiencies with the theming layer for some client projects. Ethan took it upon himself to explore WordPress for the company and laid out a product to sell to potential clients built on WordPress.

Seeing as he is the principal architect for Blue Tent and managing developers and projects in both platforms, we thought we’d bring him on the show to chat.

• With PSR-0 namespacing, modern PHP coding standards, and that Drupal is committed to RESTful web services coming, it’s an exciting time in the Drupal comunity
• Blue Tent is using Drupal building mobile applications by using Ionic
• Drupal will be used for the foreseeable future due to a 12 year investment to a proprietary piece of software

• Early adopters of the API using 1.x branch moving to 2.x branch doesn’t seem daunting
• Ethan highly recommends learning Bourbon and Neat
• Day #1, deployment, continuous integration and provisioning happens with all projects
• Use Jenkins to handle all the automated processed for setting up staging sites, ticket resolution, etc
• Use Behat for behavioral driven tests rather than Unit tests
• Talk about the Fields API and some existing faults with the current solutions

• Developers weren’t kicking and screaming to use WordPress, but the sales and account managers were
• Loads of education for the developers, alongside the rest of the company
• Just get into it and see what happens then share experiences

You can find Ethan on Twitter and Blue Tent website.