This article is about storing information about site development. You will be able easy find it and make your corrections. Besides, sometimes you should pass this info to other web-developer.

Solutions

• Making records on books.
• Recording you actions to a file (text or xls).
• Using sitedoc Drupal module which gathers all info about site settings on the first page.
• Using ProjectPier script to manage projects. It requires PHP5 and access to database.
• Using storm Drupal module which allows to manage development process.

Making records on books

You should develop your own documentation method for that.

sitedoc module

Site Documentation module picks up information from various places within the Drupal environment. Some of the information comes from internal arrays, some is derived from system calls, and some comes directly from the database tables. As one might imagine, this gathering does not come without a price; you can expect a spike in database and CPU activity while this module runs. Therefore, one should be careful how often and when it is run.

• The Site Documentation module presents the following summarized information:
• Basic Drupal summary – lists some basic information about your Drupal installation.
• Database summary – list all tables and pertinent information.
• Sequences Summary – displays the last id of various table entries.
• Node Summary – lists how many of all content types are in the database, along with status information.
• Node Access Summary – checks the node_access table to see if all nodes are represented, and includes the ability to see which nodes are in which realms. (Unlike Devel Nodes Access, this does not require any other modules like Views.)
• Content types – detailed list of content type settings.
• Vocabularies – shows all the defined vocabularies (taxonomies) and all the terms within them, along with usage counts and other settings.
• Modules – lists all modules that are known to the Drupal system, even if not enabled. This list is much like that of the Modules Admin page (I borrowed some of that code), and includes dependencies. This now also includes path checking to help detect module in the wrong places.
• Themes – lists all the available themes, whether enabled or not.
• Theme_Engine – shows which theme engines are available.
• System Variables – lists all variables defined by all modules, along with their content.
• Blocks – shows a complete list of the blocks that are defined, whether enabled or not. It will also check to see if the theme that owns them exists any longer; if not, a warning message may be issued.
• Boxes – this shows additional information for manually created blocks.
• Roles and Permissions – lists all user roles along with their access permissions, blocks that are restricted to the role, and may include all users assigned to the role.
• Contacts – displays all email contacts for the site.
• Profile Fields – shows custom user profile fields used on this site.
• URL Aliases – shows URL Aliases that are defined along with broken and duplicate links. The alias numbers and node IDs are hyper linked to ease corrections.

storm module

STORM (SpeedTech Organization and Resource Manager) is a project management application for Drupal.

It provides the following features :

• Attributes : to manage the different list of values used in STORM, like : tasks status, countries, currencies and so on
• Organizations : the companies or individual stakeholders of your projects
• Projects : your projects. Every project can have multiple tasks hierarchically nested to build a WBS
• Tasks : the parts that compose a project
• Tickets : every ticket can be associated with an organization, project and task
• Timetrackings : where you can register your activities on an organization, project, task or ticket
• Permission control : a fine grained permission control permits to share the data with other users and organizations

ProjectPier script

 www.projectpier.org can be used to manage projects, tasks & developers blog are always available for viewing, all info is in the same place. Very simple support.

PHP5 is required for its working.
The script sends notification emails about all changes.

It has more abilities than storm module. You can create:

• Messages
• Tasks
• Phases 
• Files
• Labels
• Forms 
• Members

Summary

Records on paper are safe but you cannot pas, copy, change, protect and even fill these records if all the rest of info are made in electronic form. But this is better than nothing!

Saving your data to a file is similar to records on paper but you can copy and change the file faster.

If you need to use Drupal module, then the best way is to use sitedoc module. You can use it for 6 version too.

If you need a system for management of many projects, communicating with customers, setting terms and planning, then:
Use storm module for Drupal 6,
and ProjectPier script which doesn’t depend on Drupal for the rest of cases.

Have fun!