Drupal is an open-source PHP Content Management System widely used for developing dynamic websites. It’s made by a dedicated community. Drupal is a content management system and framework for building websites. It includes features to display, manage, publish, and maintain website content with varying degrees of complexity from the personal weblog to business news sites or e-commerce stores.
One of Drupal’s key differentiators from other web frameworks is its broad selection of modules that provide social networking as well as integration opportunities for other systems including bbPress Forum software, OpenID authentication provider Livefyre, WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE (provided by Moxiecode), Google Analytics module Piwik data collector Flogger plugin, jQuery library masonry grid layout Panels module and more!
There are many benefits of using Drupal on your site:
- Flexibility in design with different themes available or even customize it yourself!
- SEO optimization – you can configure the URLs, metadata tags (such as meta keywords), breadcrumbs (for navigation systems), and more for better indexing by search engines like Google.
- Security – as mentioned above there have been some security vulnerabilities discovered in previous versions so this should be taken into consideration.
- User-friendliness – Drupal is designed to be user-friendly for different roles, such as administrators and editors. Editors can create content without having to know HTML or CSS which allows them more time to focus on their specific needs.* It’s free!
For these reasons, Drupal has become one of the most popular open-source CMS platforms in the world today. If you’re thinking about creating a website then it might make sense for your site too!
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Tutorials and Courses
There are varied ways for you to learn Drupal. You can browse some useful websites which offer free blogs about it, or you can watch videos on YouTube. But if you are looking for a convenient way to learn Drupal, a highly recommended easiest way is to avail of some paid tutorials and courses that will give you a step-by-step guide to learning it. Cut the frustration on some complicated ways of learning it, and switch to some tutorials and courses that are worth your money!
- Introduction to Drupal – This offers all topics about learning Drupal. You will learn here what Drupal is and how to use it. Basically, this course will work well to those beginners who are not familiar yet with Drupal. If you are looking for reasons why you should learn Drupal, then this training course will give you tons of reasons.
- Studyopedia Drupal Tutorial – This is a step-by-step guide to learning about Drupal 8. Step-by-step lessons are provided covering topics, which will help you in preparing a dynamic website. If you aren’t a programmer, this list is also useful.
- Drupal 8 Basics – 22 videos about Drupal 8’s basic features.
- Learning Drupal 8 – This course is designed for the absolute beginner, meaning no experience with Drupal is required. Once you have completed this training course, you will be fully capable of installing, building, deploying, and maintaining your own customized Drupal websites
Drupal Editors
You can use any text/code editor to develop modules and themes for Drupal. The following has built-in supports or great extensions for Drupal:
- PhpStorm – PhpStorm is perfect for working with Drupal with all the PHP tools.
- Visual Studio Code – This tutorial consists of a list of recommended official and contributed extensions that will allow you to configure Visual Studio Code for Drupal PHP and JavaScript development.
- Codelobster + Drupal – The Drupal plug-in turns a Drupal editor into a full-fledged Drupal IDE!
Tools
- Drupal Site Scaffolder – Easily start a new Drupal 7 / 8 project with main modules built over composer.
- Drupal-Scaffold – This is a boilerplate Drupal 8 build that bundles some standard tools to make it a good starting point for an enterprise-scale Drupal build.
- drupaltools.github.io – A list of popular open-source and free tools that can help people accomplish Drupal-related tasks.
- generator-angular-drupal – Scaffold an AngularJS app, to make it headless with Drupal Backend.
- generator-marionette-drupal – This generator creates an HTML 5 application using an MVC pattern implemented with MarionetteJS and Backbone. Drupal for the data model.
- DrupalVM Generator – This is a Yeoman generator for quickly spawning configured VMs or new projects using DrupalVM by Jeff Geerling.
Best Drupal Themes
- Porto – Porto is a professional and multipurpose Drupal theme for any business or portfolio website. It’s a fully responsive design ready to look stunning on any device.
- EM – EM is a premium Drupal and Thunder theme with an outstanding design with impressive features that will perfectly suit any blog, magazine, or any other publishing website.
- Martis – Martis is an Ecommerce theme using Drupal Commerce. It features advanced product attribute variations with different product types, Product reviews, product attributes, cart and all you need for your next online commerce shop.
- Bootstrap Mint – Bootstrap Mint is a fully Responsive, mobile-first Drupal 8 theme built on the Bootstrap 3.x Framework.
- Zymphonies – Drupal8 Zymphonies Theme is the first Zymphonies Drupal 8 free responsive theme which has many new features. it offers flexible blocks.
- Marinelli – The theme s a 3-column, tableless layout theme with a wide image banner and a “top-tabbed” primary-links system.
- Flexi Cart – This is a Drupal Commerce Mobile first Theme. It is the best way for you to display and sell your products.
- Skeleton – It is a free responsive Drupal theme, built upon the Skeleton Boilerplate. It has been inspired by the excellent Skeleton WordPress theme.
- Drupal8 W3CSS – Drupal8 W3CSS Theme is the first Drupal 8 theme that uses the w3.css framework. When building this theme, I focused on ease of use and a fast load time.
- MAYO – MAYO is developed based on experience with the PIXTURE theme. However, it takes full advantage of Drupal 7’s color module and advanced theme settings. MAYO is simple but flexible.
Best Drupal Plugins
- Webform – Webform is the module for making forms and surveys in Drupal.
- Display Suite – Display Suite allows you to take full control over how your content is displayed using a drag-and-drop interface. Arrange your nodes, views, comments, user data etc.
- GraphQL – With this Drupal 8 GraphQL module you can expose Drupal entities to your GraphQL client applications.
- Paragraphs – Paragraphs is the new way of content creation! It allows you — Site Builders — to make things cleaner so that you can give more editing power to your end-users.
- Rabbit Hole – Rabbit Hole is a module that adds the ability to control what should happen when an entity is being viewed on its own page.
- Field Group – Fieldgroup will, as the name implies, group fields together. All fieldable entities will have the possibility to add groups to wrap their fields together. Fieldgroup comes with default HTML wrappers like vertical tabs, horizontal tabs, accordions, fieldsets, or div wrappers.
- Pathauto – It automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.
- MMenu – This module integrates the menu jQuery plugin with Drupal’s menu system with the aim of having an off-canvas mobile menu and a horizontal menu at wider widths.
- AdvAgg – AdvAgg allows you to improve the frontend performance of your site.
- Twig Tweak – Twig Tweak is a small module which provides a Twig extension with some useful functions and filters that can improve development experience.
- Coffee – It helps you to navigate through the Drupal admin faster.
- Adminimal Admin Toolbar – This module provides a minimalist style to Admin Toolbar for Drupal 8.
Blog Posts
Tips
As a developer you are going to want to be familiar with Drupal, but it might take some time to learn it. Here are 10 of the best tips that you should be aware of, such as:
- You can use profiles to quickly install Drupal if you don’t want anything other than the “core” format or different configurations with the profiles.
- Ensuring that you are writing down the email address, user name and password for the #1 user since it is going to be the administration.
- Make use of Google if you are coming up with errors and aren’t sure how to fix the error that you are getting.
- Ensure that you are customizing all of the error pages for your website since they can be less intimidating and can contain more information.
- Making sure that you have an SQL backup of all of the information in case the page crashes so it can easily and quickly be put back up again.
- If there are any problems that you don’t know why they are happening ensure that you are first clearing the function to flush the cache.
- You need to ensure that you are aware of the various types of content pages that can be used and that you fully explain them to the customers.
- You also should make sure that you know what the various user roles are going to be and what permissions each of these individuals would have on the website.
- Be aware of some of the top places where you would be able to get high-quality themes for free that allows the client to see and pick what they like.
- Ensuring that all of the basic information for the website is filled in like the mission statement, footer information, slogan, system messages and much more.
These are just some of the top tips that you need to make sure that you know about and that you are using as a Drupal developer.
Make sure that you are aware of what is what on the website and that you are keeping track of the information for the #1 user, which would be the site administrator. Also, you want to keep a backup of the website somewhere safe that you would be able to access in case it goes down and you need to get it back up again. The final thing to do is ensure that you are able to explain to the customer the various content page types and much more when you are getting started.
