By gecko001 on

Hi There,
I have searched but not found the answer. Can anyone point me to an article of what you should do once your site is up and running.
ie; What needs to be tied down to make sure my site runs safe and secure. What should i do to make sure it performs properly.

Any pointers appreciated.

Regards
Gecko

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

marcvangend’s picture

marcvangend
he/him
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

Good question! I'm surprised to find that there isn't a decent overview of things to do once your site is live (or at least, I couldn't find it).

There are some pages about performance and caching on http://drupal.org/node/627252, http://drupal.org/node/326504 and http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/system. Even more information about optimizing performance can be found in the High Performance group (http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance, http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897). To keep your site secure, you obviously need to keep track of available updates for Drupal core and contrib modules.

Things I do before a site goes live include:
- checking if there are slow queries
- checking the logs for errors
- running the site through Yslow
- cleaning up unused contrib modules and themes (if any)
- cleaning up test nodes and files

Things I do when a site goes live include:
- disabling development modules such as Devel and Views UI
- enable cache and CSS/JS optimization
- make sure crontab is configured properly on your server

There is a lot more you can do for performance, but if it's needed, effective and worthwhile depends on your site, your visitors and your server.

Drupalace-1’s picture

Drupalace-1 commented

I've got some beginner-oriented admin documentation at http://www.drupalace.com/EDAM . It's primarily for non-technical admins who are handed control of a site, but should be useful too for someone who's just set up a site.

gecko001’s picture

gecko001 commented

Thanks you guys I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

It seems that we should create a best practice handbook or a check list for drupal users to go through and tick off. Where would we put this info and who is qualified to moderate the info quality?

Gecko

marcvangend’s picture

marcvangend
he/him
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

You can edit and add pages to the handbooks yourself, so you don't have to bother the documentation team with smaller improvements. In this case, because it's a completely new page, I think it would be good to create a new issue in the Documentation issue queue (http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/documentation) first and explain your ideas. You can also join the #drupal-docs irc channel to discuss and collaborate.