DrupalBriefs: How to architect and document Drupal

How does one properly document the architecture of a Drupal website? Drupal architecture can get complicated fairly quickly and include a significant amount of interrelated parts. For example, you might have 23 content types that share one or more of the fields, display modes, and views that you have created. There isn't really a good way to describe the purpose behind these relationships within Drupal or third party documentation systems at this time. Each of these individual items and their relationships with one another should be documented for the benefit of your designers, developers, project managers, other architects, and clients. Architecture documentation is traditionally limited to Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or one-off implementations that don't scale well when the next project comes along. To combat this problem, my team at Unleashed Technologies has developed a Symfony web application called DrupalBriefs (www.drupalbriefs.com). I'm the lead architect at our company, and Word documents and spreadsheets were not allowing the team to collaborate effectively on large projects. The sole purpose of DrupalBriefs is to allow for intuitive Drupal architecture documentation entry in the form of "Creative Briefs", which is our term for a document that describes the plan for building a website. From within the system, you can add and relate the following resources: * Content Types * Display Modes * Fields * Views * Blocks * Taxonomies * Pages * References (These are uploaded wireframes or designs that can be annotated. Individual annotations can be related to other resources as well) * Custom Modules * Contributed Modules During this session, I will: * Provide an overview of how Unleashed Technologies has leveraged DrupalBriefs to improve its architecture and documentation process. * Demonstrate the creation of a Brief by using DrupalBriefs during the session * Discuss how a system like this is necessary for the Drupal ecosystem as it provides Drupal-specific documentation that is necessary for anyone involved in the creation or maintenance of a website. This session will be targeted towards developers, project managers, and architects who are directly responsible for the architecture and creation of Drupal websites. Our goal is to present a new way of thinking about Drupal architecture documentation by leveraging DrupalBriefs.