Porting site audit to Drupal 8

As part of Four Kitchens’ ongoing commitment to Drupal 8, I’ve been collaborating on the next generation version of Site Audit, a project for analyzing Drupal sites for best practices. Earlier this year, Site Audit was selected for inclusion in the Drupal Google Summer of Code 2015. The student I’ve been working with, Shivanshu Agrawal, has been doing a fantastic job of adapting the existing code and reverse engineering the still-moving (but almost complete) target of Drupal 8. Some of the checks have been copied directly from Drupal 7, but others have needed a much more comprehensive rewrite.

We’ve been using GitHub for code collaboration and issue tracking, mirroring what’s on Drupal.org. There’s a number of advantages to this, including having a flexible issue queue with milestones and a pull request review process. We use GitHub for most projects internally already and Shivanshu was already familiar with it, so it was a natural fit. We’ve also been using Harvest for time tracking.

The GSoC project started with a series of interviews with agencies and groups that provide professional auditing, including Hook42, Kalamuna, Pantheon, and Four Kitchens (not myself). Shivanshu had four goals:

• Learn how professional services are performed
• Learn how different professionals accomplish similar tasks
• Identify “pain” points and areas of potential improvement
• Document and plan Site Audit additions to address issues identified

The actionable items were documented and will be used to drive future development, some of which may take place during the GSoC (time allowing).

Currently, the Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 versions of Site Audit are in near feature parity. There’s some more work to be done, including automated testing and new features to be added to both systems. Shivanshu wrote a fantastic blog post about Writing automated tests for Drush Commands, which I really recommend.

I’ve been enjoying Google Summer of Code and the progress being made on the project for a number of reasons. Shivanshu’s been great, and collaboration on next-generation open source technology with new talent is wonderful fit with Four Kitchens. The results will be available to everyone and the experience directly improves our ability to provide services in new areas like Drupal 8 in unique ways.