POWER FOR THE MASSES — a dev workflow metamodel for Drupal tourists and locals

For some, site building with Drupal is no honeymoon. We all start out with the goal of a fully deployed, online presence. But the learning curve, lingo, and hint of “Wild West” in competing development environments and tooling can amount to a big letdown.

What might streamline and help standardize the workflow cycle?

• Inventory our options. Categorize and define all our localdev and PaaS resources, consistently. [controlled vocabulary, flat taxonomy, ontology]
• Show what works together. Relate the data through semantic functions built into D7 and off-the-shelf schemata. [RDF, DOAP, interoperability]
• Think “building blocks.” Introduce a metamodel — an explicit set of abstractions to formalize concepts like this. (Bonus: They are in general use outside of the Drupalsphere) [domain model, mappings, UML]
• Mash it up. Take the metamodel further with cues from other industry standard practices. [TOGAF, Zachman Framework, process specification]

Paradigms for this already exist on the Web — usually done in Drupal, no less. We will see how they inspire our own aim: A universal, dynamic, repeatable, effective approach to classification and best practices . . . in common language, for anyone building with Drupal.