[consulting] Patching code on client's site, and general packaging of customizations

[Larry Garfield]

On Wednesday 13 December 2006 19:41, Gary Feldman wrote:

> On a more general, related note:  How do you package up customizations?
> For themes, poor man's inheritance works ok.  For hooks, a simple
> obvious approach is to create a custom module for any given client, and
> put the hooks (form alters, etc.) there.  This works, but doesn't feel
> right to me.  I have yet to do anything large enough to justify a
> dedicated module for a specific feature, so this general module turns
> into a grab bag of miscellaneous hooks.

Every site of consequence I've done has had a site-specific module that holds 
random hooks and callbacks and such.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  
Sometimes I'll make a separate module for a feature if I think it's 
sufficiently general, but on the site I'm building at work now, for instance, 
95% of the actual code I've written for it has either been in sitename.module 
or template.php.  Most of the rest is in the header of a view page or 
something along those lines. :-)

My company is not a Drupal shop primarily (this is our first Drupal site), and 
we don't have CVS at work (just SVN), so what I've been doing for patches is 
making an issue with some notes in it on the appropriate project, then when I 
get home (or a day or three later) rolling the patch at home myself and 
submitting that.  Then I just tell the client "here's this issue, be 
careful".  So far it hasn't caused any major catastrophes, but then they've 
all been fairly minor changes.  I'm rather curious how more active 
consultant/developers handle it.  

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
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