Coldfront Labs

Inevitably during your development process, the client is going to want to see how things are going. And typically in these cases you don't want to demo on the actual development environment. So you setup a test site to demo everything which may or may not contain all those lovely Drupal development modules (i.e. coder, devel, etc...). And if that's true, what if there are stray 'dsm' calls in your committed code? I mean it's safe to assume you grabbed a copy from your repo which is still under active development so it's safe to assume there's some dev code in there. And that code will cause critical errors with those dev modules missing. The last thing you want is to show big error pages during a demo!

Now I know this is a lot of if's but it could happen (trust me...). Here's how to avoid it:

What you'll need: Your fingers and cooperative developers

As much as I love using Drupal, every once in a while something goes horribly, horribly wrong. Mind you, in most cases, I may have had a hand in the error (updated the wrong module, forgot a file or two, etc...) but the end result is the same; the dreaded WSOD (White Screen Of Death). These occur when PHP has some kind of error while processing your request. The problem with this is the user, unless they're technically inclined, has no idea why all they see is a big blank white screen (I'm assuming you've disabled the output of errors to the page in production. If you haven't, what are you waiting for!). Not only that, they'll just keep refreshing the page and potentially adding to your problems by having half executed PHP code running a muck on your data.