Drupal allows to define a lot of things without programming. This makes it tempting to start development withot planning. Don't be tempted. A solid information architecture is an important part of the play. Writes Larry Garfield:
One of the key challenges Drupal developers face when building a complex Drupal site is that there are many moving parts. It's not unusual for a mid- to large-sized site to have as many as a dozen content types, 50+ fields (some of them shared), 20 different Views displays, a couple of flags, some nodequeues ... there's a lot that goes into a Drupal build. Keeping track of all of them can be a challenge when building out a site. What was that View called? Did we remember to name fields consistently? Singular or plural? Wait, did we use Flag or Nodequeue here? Okay, who forgot to include help text!
While it's tempting to say "Drupal is configurable, and we're Agile, we'll figure it out as we go!", that's rarely a workable answer for any but the most trivial sites... Planning out how the entire site's content model and build will look is itself a valuable exercise, as it reduces errors and improves overall consistency and quality. To that end, we've developed a tool that we now use for all sites to aid in discovery, strategy, and planning: the Build Spec.
The google-drive worksheet template attached to Larry's article is a great tool to control a Drupal project.
We can add a column to each tab where we link the defined entity to the actual definition on the site. This will make the tool much more usable during the later project steps and as a result will increase it's chance of being kept up to date.
Once we do that we can add an overview tab show a birds-eye status of the spec. This tab can count the number of views, content types, flags, etc... with links to the respective tabs. If we added the link column as suggested above, we can show progress (10/84 views, 5/12 rules, 2/5 flags have been defined).
Also I miss context, rules and panels tabs, as well as a sitemap where we can track the progress and status of each main page.
Sign in to your google account and clone the worksheet template now:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuIiRK97zQSYdG1EUXNxdDhtVlZ...
Amnon