Site upgrade tasks -- pre-migration cleanup

[jim]

This ticket is to track the issues left over from #590 that need to be considered and tackled prior to migrating the site from D6 to D7 (or 8).

Please feel free to add as needed, but sticky to the

C) Cleanup: List of features we don't really need

Ed to add his items to following list... Need rational and alternative approaches for each.

• C.1) Remove 'Geographic region' and related taxonomy and Hierarchical Select modules 1 hour, low reward, low risk -- never really been used and is effectively a duplicate of the location field. let's kill it!
• C.2) Kill Microsites and the Forums -- The handful of people using the CMS feature should be migrated to Open Atrium if they need such features.
• C.3) Remove forums -- We could migrate the forum to a simpler setup (not using forum module) that leverages normal commenting, or even Disqus or other services to offload comments and moderation. Also encourage user-submitted ocontent and promote that if it's good or gets interesting debate.

D) Key development tasks

• D.1) All inline PHP must be moved to modules and features -- This has great benefit for management, maintenance and developers. Eval()uated code is much slower than PHP in files, especially since it can't be accelerated by APC or Zend Opcode cache... We have a few blocks and many views that are loaded from the database and evaluated. Ideally the blocks would be moved to the 'Transition Extras' module, and the views would be pushed into features. This work is good to do for maintainability and D7 upgrades, too. See: ​http://2bits.com/api/abuse-drupal-best-practices-your-own-peril-poor-performance.html and ​http://2bits.com/articles/free-your-content-php-moving-php-code-out-blocks-views-and-nodes.html

• D.2) Build in ESI (Edge Side Includes) support from the outset, ensure Drupal renders only what it needs to -- BOA packages the ​ESI (Edge Side Includes integration) module, which makes NginX cache the whole page (as it does now), but also for user-logged in pages (which it does for 5 seconds since the page data changes). This means Drupal renders the ESI component (blocks, panels panes) that are have user-specific data in. Potential boost quickly, but will need time to tweak settings to get best from this across whole site. See ​comments in 4 & 5 below for discussion, should be done after proposal F, above.

E) Key editorial tasks

• E.1) More Taxonomy cleanup -- try to merge terms with the same names, clear out spammy terms, general spit-and-polish. Ed plus team of busy interns to do this when the time is right.

Z) old stuff for reference; tasks from #590 rendered pointless by move

• Z.1) Find Variable table writes and kill them -- seeing plenty of SELECT * FROM variable calls, which imply a cache clear due to a variable being set. In normal use variables shouldn't be set (admin screens tend to do this), so I'd like to try to see what module it causing this and patch/remove it. Will need to run grep -R "variable_set() * > ~/static/variable_set-calls.txt" in the {{{sites/all directory to generate a list, then trawl though it to find candidates/bad modules practice.

[ed]

1. October's maintenance time is all used up - so NO MORE work on this until November.
2. C.1) TN's strategy is heading towards regional model with CRM/membership style tools for regional hubs - it's not clear how 'regions' will be defined - so although this quartering of the UK hasn't worked in this version, we will be needing to define regions in some way in TN V3. Therefore - do we remove this earlier work and replace with something better and more CRM-y in 2014 or keep this earlier work?
3. C.2) CMS removal plan being formulated
4. C.3) Happy to remove forum technology but need to keep something onboard that lets normal users add posts of some form. Use of distributed technology tbd; depends on TN's strategy and apporach to using third party software, particularly distributed services (US-based) - ie what's the political line the web project is following...

[ed]

Also suggest

1. De-commission PSE - might help with load as well - been a high driver of traffic
2. De-commission Sharing Engine - also been quite heavy user

Both are nice to have, but have not got traction to stop us closing them. Will be extra migration faff for little value, and probably need re-writing in D7 anyway.