AWebFactory the making of (Part 2) Getting started with process, methods and tools

In my book Leveraging Drupal I set out to wed what have always been my career basing best software development process practices with Drupal site building and development. Chapter 1 (possibly the only part of the book not immediately obsolete the moment it was published in February, 2009), entitled “Keeping it Simple”, describes the process you can practice in order to squarely face the varied responsibilities of getting a web app up and running. It names the steps you can follow towards fulfilling that goal. It is still freely downloadable as an example chapter. We will use it to gear ourselves towards implementing a properly prioritized backlog of stories in order to revamp AWebFactory.com .

Now, we could just say, as is increasingly the fashion, “we use scrum”, or “we use agile” and even provide the obligatory life-cycle diagrams. But how do we actually get to that? In what context are we even operating? The only fair starting point for any target app is: Why build it at all?

AWebFactory.com revamp: the making of (Part 1) – Setting up an Eclipse IDE development environment for your Pantheon Project

This is the first of a series of articles which will log the revamping of the AWebFactory company website and its migration to Pantheon, the “Cloud Platform for Drupal”, which will not only be host to live deployment, but which will also serve as a development platform.

Signing up

So I signed up for an account on Pantheon, a free developer account to begin with. I went to https://www.getpantheon.com/ and clicked on Create Free Account. Filled out the details, received a confirmation account (curiously, even with GMail, which is pretty discerning about those things, it arrived in the Spam folder, so do check that when you create your account), and after validating my site when I was logged in (https://dashboard.getpantheon.com/login ) there was a sign on my dashboard offering a link to Create a site now.