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Beginning Drupal Development
Meghan Sweet (@meghsweet)26 January 2013
SANDCamp 2013
Saturday, January 26, 2013
How do you learn Drupal?
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Sometimes things are really easy.
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Sometimes things are really hard.
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Choosing ModulesStand on the Shoulders of Giants
- Assess the project page
- Read the README file (believe me)
- Check the issue log
- When in doubt, ask around
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http://drupal.org/project/views/
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Where does Contributed code live?Put all contrib modules in ../sites/all/modules/OR../sites/all/modules/contrib
Put all custom modules in../sites/all/modules/custom
Put all themes in ../sites/all/themes
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What do you need in your toolbox?HTML / CSS / Javascript / PHP
A good code editor
Firebug or Chrome Inspector
Drush
Drupal Community
Willingness to break things
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Development EnvironmentWork locally!! No more FTPing
Use version control to push changes.
Drush is your friend
You won’t regret learning command line tools
Be equipped to browser test
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Development WorkflowDevelopment Environment- Dev > Test > Live
Where do your clients QA?
Use Version control to push to production- great for rolling back changes- great for multi-developer environments
Code vs Content, do smart migrations
Set up a workflow to push to production
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The “Drupal Way”?
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Site Development Plan
Typical Drupal Site
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Gall's Law
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked...
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Build features zoomed in, then pull back and
see how it all fits together.
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Write a development planForces you to think through your architecture and implications of decisions
Makes it a lot easier to build quickly- ex: grab all your modules at once, understand content and layout dependencies
Build, then theme
90% of the way there is often enough- Don’t be afraid to talk to your clients and get to the heart of business needs
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Structure Content
Break up your content into the pieces you want control over.
Important in mobile theming- content first
Consider your admins and your visitors.
Good content is user-centeredAdopt the cognitive frameworks of your users- E R I N K I S S A N E
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Feature DevelopmentIts essentially three steps, rinse and repeat.
1) Build a content type
2) Build a view
3) Build a layout
(Theme)
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Slow Site?
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Common Client-side Performance PitfallsLook for the obvious first:
-Are you caching?
-Are you aggregating your CSS?
-Are the images huge?
These are stupidly easy wins :)
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Theming!
Where everything can be overridden.
Oh the power and the danger...
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There is no "best" theme.
-@rupl
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Where to start
- ‘Starter’ themes- Base Themes- Responsive Theming- Click-to-Config
Develop a theming strategy and find a theme to match
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Control your layout through configurationPanels, Panelizer, Panopoly
Context
Omega
Display Suite
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Advancing Theming
Its all about Overriding
Configuration -> CSS -> PHP
Keep it clean and organized
Keep a custom module for small stuff
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You can give back to the community.
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Coding Standards-Don’t Hack Core! It may seems like a good idea now, but its not.
- Comment heavily! You’ll thank yourself later.
- Before you do something, consider if you can make it easier to understand. Writing code for yourself is a bad idea.
- Use descriptive classes
- http://drupal.org/coding-standards
- http://drupal.org/project/coder will check for you
- http://drupal.org/project/examples
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GIT Standards- Commit often, and do single-issue commits
- Write good commit messages, use real english and reference outside information (ticket number, Drupal.org issues)
- Remove things you don’t need with a proper commit, don’t just comment them out
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Pay it forward- Participate in the issue queue and documentation.
- If you use a patch (regardless of whether it works or fails), comment on the issue.
- If you write a patch, post it.
- Write documentation and blog
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Learn MoreBooks
Training
Documentation
Blogs
Videos
Meetups
Camps and Cons
IRC
Spirit of willingness, giving back and helping each other
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Thank You!@meghsweet
@chapter_threeSaturday, January 26, 2013
