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What is a Drupal developer?
As the Drupal market continues to rock and roll, more and more clients need “Drupal Developers”. But what exactly is a Drupal Developer? A Drupal Developer is someone who knows Drupal right? Right?!
There always has been some confusion around job titles and skills in the Drupal world. This is especially true with some recruiters and even managers and clients that are hiring. In effect, there are three main areas of expertise in the Drupal world: site building, backend/module development and theming. The skills required for each are quite different.
Drupal Site Builder
A Drupal site builder is someone who builds Drupal sites with point and click in the admin UI without writing much or any custom code. I say much, because they might implement the odd hook here and there. But most of the functionality of the site/application comes from configuring Drupal core and contributed modules. Site Builders will have experience with a wide range of contributed modules and will understand how they work together to solve a particular problem. They will understand the limitations of modules and should be able to provide a concise argument of the pros and cons of various solutions. Site Builders will build the content types, taxonomy, navigation, image presets, rules etc. One of the magnificent things about Drupal is that it does not exclude non-developers. The Drupal community and the platform provides a very powerful tool set for people to build innovative and complex sites without the requirement to be a programmer. And mastering this is a very valuable skill in itself.
Drupal Themer / Frontend developer
A Drupal Themer is the specialist front end developer. They are experts in HTML, CSS and Javascript. They are also experts in the Drupal theme layer. They should be able to take a design and turn it into the working theme. Ideally they will be well versed in implementing responsive design.
Drupal Module Developer / Backend developer
A Drupal developer is someone who writes a lot of PHP and other server side languages. They write custom modules, automated tests, consume web services, automate deployment etc. They may also be know as “backend Drupal developers”. They may also get involved in some of the more advanced side of the theme layer as well. Often they will set up automated deployment.
A note on contributing and collaboration
Drupal is inherently a collaborative project. Site Builders, Module Developers and Themers will often contribute their work back to the community and collaborate with others. It is common for module developers to share and collaborate on contributed modules, themers on contributed themes and site builders on site building recipes and other forms of documentation.
The Three Disciplines
Drupal Generalist /Jack of All trades
It is very common to do all three. You may be more advanced in one area or another, but still act in a general capacity.
In most of the projects I have worked on, there has not been a dedicated site builder. Both backend developers and fronted developers will do elements of site building.
How a business hire and use Drupal people varies. In one extreme, a business may hire specialists. To deliver a particular piece of functionality or feature, the work may have to go through each of the specialities before it is done. One of the other extremes, is a business may assume that a Drupal person should do all three specialities. In this case, it is common for the team to be a team of “Drupal Developers” and the role encompasses site building, backend development and theming. Both approaches have their pros and cons, but that is for another day!
Other roles
Just like any other web development setup, there is a range of other roles included in the process of building and support Drupal applications. This includes:
Sysadmin / Devops — run the live stack, will often deploy Drupal sites to the live environment, deal with performance issues, setup a CDN, Varnish, Memcache etc.
QA — test all changes to ensure quality and that they meet the requirements. Setup automated tests.
Project Manager / Scrum Master — run the scrum team, remove impediments to progress, ensure delivery of the project on time and budget.
Product owner — comes up with the requirements. Works closely with the project manager to prioritise the backlog. Normally has final sign off of all changes.
Design / UX — comes up with the design and user experience. They might build prototypes that can then be converted into a Drupal theme.
Who is not a Drupal developer
This advice should be given to any recruiter or hirer in the Drupal space. A PHP developer is not necessarily a Drupal developer. It does not matter how good the PHP developer is at PHP, unless they have decent Drupal experience and understand its API’s and, dare I say it, “the Drupal way”, they will make many mistakes. You will then need to hire an experienced Drupal developer to clean up the mess left behind. Of course, I am being a bit simplistic here. In current times where demand far out strips supply, it as not as simple as that. You might be forced to hire a PHP developer who doesn’t have much (or any) Drupal experience. That is fine, but the minimum requirement should be that the developer wants to learn the Drupal standards, understand the Drupal culture and try and do it the Drupal way. You don’t want someone who treats it as just another framework that can be bent and broken to the developer’s way of thinking. That is a recipe for creating a maintenance nightmare that will cost the business in the long run.
Where do you go from here?
When I first launched the early edition of my book, Master Drupal Module Development, I asked people on my mailing list whether they were Site Builders, Backend Developers or Themers. The split was mostly between Site Builders and Backend Developers but most of the developers were people who developed in tech outside of Drupal and were looking to find the best way to learn Drupal development.
Developer from another technology
If you are a developer from another technology, there are a couple of routes available. One is to build a couple of sites using pure site building. And then, once you are happy with the basics of Drupal, you could dive into module development. Being an experienced developer will almost certainly give you a leg up, because you obviously already know how to do development. Now you need to learn the Drupal APIs and the Drupal way.
Site Builder
If you are a site builder, you might want to move into module/backend development. Because you already know your way around Drupal, you also have a leg up. However, you still need to learn the Drupal APIs and the Drupal way of developing. In addition, if you don’t have any or much programming experience, you will need to learn some of that to. You don’t need to be a programming genius to get started with Drupal development. You can get started with just the basics of PHP in addition to something like my book.
Themer
If you are a themer, you might not want to do anything else but get better at theming and frontend development. After all, there is a ton to master there, especially when you include CSS and Javascript. But you might want to learn some module development. It will certainly help you broaden your horizons and achieve more.
Module Developer
If you are a Module/Backend Developer, then where do you go? You can always learn more about theming. But might also consider learning more about being a solutions architect. If you are happy being a backend developer, then getting more experience in other PHP frameworks (such as Laravel or Symfony2) is very beneficial to your career prospects and capabilities as a developer.
Where do you fit in?
Do you consider yourself a Site Builder, Themer, Module Developer or something else? Are you looking to move into another area? If so, what are your main obstacles? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Drupal — что это?
Drupal — это система управления контентом (CMS), которая лежит в основе очень многих сайтов. Движок Drupal обладает практически неограниченными возможностями. При помощи данной системы можно создать сайт совершенно любой сложности, она также удобна и часто используется в качестве каркаса веб-приложений.
Drupal – система управления сайтами на бесплатной основе. Имеет открытый исходный код и распространяется по лицензии GPL. Это программное обеспечение позволит даже новичку публиковать, управлять и правильно организовывать содержимое на собственном сайте. Движок обладает всеми возможными функциональными особенностями для создания эффективной системы управления веб-сайтами. На движке разрабатывать сайты гораздо проще, чем писать их с нуля.
Drupal – это гибкая конфигурация и структура, целое сообщество пользователей и разработчиков, бесчисленное количество дополнительных расширений и модулей, встроенная система кеширования, поисковая система и многое другое.
Административная панель Drupal развивается усилиями энтузиастов со всего мира, анписана CMS на языке PHP, а в качестве реляционной базы данных используется MySQL, PostgreSQL и другие.
Drupal шаблоны для ведения бизнеса
Drupal шаблон на тему путеводитель
Drupal шаблон на тему строительные компании
Drupal шаблон на тему сантехника
Адаптивный Drupal шаблон на тему бизнес услуги
Адаптивный Drupal шаблон на тему блог о моде
Адаптивный Drupal шаблон на тему ресторан морепродуктов
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What Does a Drupal Developer Do and Know?
Drupal is a complex content management system (more specifically content management framework) offering great possibilities both for businesses and developers. Although the multitude of tools and subjects to learn can be overwhelming for them at first, this CMS will reward the programers with interesting technical challenges in the long run. They can also count on the support of the constantly evolving community. Do you want to become a part of it? Learn what exactly a Drupal developer should know and do.
Who are Drupal developers and what skills do they have?
These specialists build and maintain websites and applications based on Drupal, an open source system. They know its administration panel inside out. However, their abilities reach even further than that because they can create dedicated Drupal modules and themes as well as turn business needs into new features. In fact, these developers need to combine different types of knowledge and skills.
PHP and PHP framework
Drupal developer knows both PHP and one of its frameworks. It comes from the fact that Drupal 7 was created in PHP, and version 8 was built using Symfony. The latter is a PHP framework for building web services, applications, microservices, and APIs. Knowledge of PHP usually requires knowledge of Twig, its template engine (used in Drupal 8 and 9).
Frontend languages
The specialist working with Drupal is also familiar with JavaScript. We mean specifically here jQuery — a JavaScript library that facilitates carrying out a standard DOM (Document Object Model) and AJAX functions. However, working experience with Angular, React, or Vue is an asset too because one of these JavaScript frameworks can be used as a frontend of a headless Drupal solution.
Drupal website development
Considering that this type of developer creates websites, they obviously know HTML and CSS. The browsers turn the code of these languages into webpages. A Drupal developer also works with CSS preprocessors like Sass and Less. They extend the CSS language with new features which make the styling frontend faster. As the browsers don’t understand the code written with Sass and Less, a developer knows how to use JavaScript task runners, f.e. Gulp or Grunt. They enable compiling code from the abovementioned preprocessors to a regular CSS.
Drupal developers can create taxonomies, nodes, content types, image presets, and navigation, as well as work with Drupal APIs. As for the latter, we mean, for example:
- Form API used for creating and processing forms on a website,
- Render API, which deals with the render arrays, pipeline, elements, and caching,
- Cache API that stores data taking a long time to compute,
- Database API provides a developer a standard abstraction layer for accessing database servers.
Regarding databases, a Drupal developer also knows SQL and MySQL for setting up Drupal databases.
Modules creation
The modules are plugins that extend the possibilities of Drupal and enable integrating it with different third-party tools and services. They are provided for free by the community gathered around this CMS. The developers know how to research, install and configure modules most appropriate for a particular project. They should also be able to build new modules as sometimes meeting customer requirements involves creating custom solutions from scratch. Drupal developers need to know how to do it using core hooks and module hooks.
Themes creation
The same as with modules, the programer not only configures themes, offered by Drupal Community, but can also build them from the ground up and make them possible to validate with a solid HTML/CSS. Custom themes are needed as the client may need a unique and complex design for their website.
For this type of work, developers have to have a solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as they operate with a theme layer. They should also be able to implement responsive design.
Member of a Drupal Community
Two of the ideas behind open source are that everyone can contribute to building such a type of solution and then freely use it. Drupal Community is huge and still growing. Its members have been voluntarily written all code of this CMS. Each developer using it should also join others in improving and developing Drupal. They can do it by reporting or resolving existing issues in the projects, maintaining a theme, module, or distribution, to name a few.
How to become a Drupal developer?
You can learn Drupal development yourself or with the help of specialists having knowledge and experience in work with this CMS. The first path takes longer to complete (it also depends on the individual abilities) as you may not know where to start. Here are some ideas you can use.
- You can begin with building a site by clicking and checking different configuration options to familiarize yourself with the administration panel.
- Then you can explore the Views module by trying to make basic views and blocks. When you’ll feel comfortable with it, challenge yourself with creating more complex views with relationships and terms.
- The next step can be themes and modules. Analyzing the code of the last ones, you’ll understand how they’re built, as well as see the possibilities of Drupal’s core. Explore the most popular modules to get to know some good PHP programming practices and naming conventions.
Learning alone, you can decide what subject you discover when you do it and at what pace. The downsides may be the problems with systematizing the knowledge and verifying your solutions. However, the Drupal community will give you a helping hand in such situations.
Within the second learning path, the experienced developers can provide you with a well-thought-out Drupal Training that consists of the topics you’ll need in your future daily work.
Learning with experts in the field, I get solid knowledge resources, substantive support, and fast answers to my questions. Without the help of the mentor, I’d be still programming reproductively with a limited understanding of different subjects. — Marcin Dębicki, Drupal developer.
How long does it take to learn Drupal development?
It all depends on the abilities you have, the time you can spend on learning and using this knowledge in practice. If you don’t know PHP, it’ll take longer for you to learn both this language and Drupal. When you’re already familiar with PHP, and you’re:
- gaining knowledge alone — it can take from one to several years to feel more comfortable,
- practicing with the help of good developers — you may become an independent developer after about a year.
Learning materials
The already mentioned Drupal Community is a great source of knowledge. Its contributors prepared a page with a step-by-step guide on how to install, use, and understand this content management system. You’ll find there how to start with Drupal and which subjects to follow after that (with links to them), as well as loads of other learning resources like videos by Bob from Mustardseed. You can find more free tutorials on VideoDrupal — the community website, or on the Drupal Association YouTube channel. We also show how to do something in the system and share knowledge on modules on our blog.
As for the paid resources, you can f.e. try Drupalize.Me — a training platform with a library of video tutorials, or get the expert books. On Goodreads, you’ll find quite a few publications, like:
- Drupal 8 Development Cookbook,
- Drupal 8 Module Development: Build modules and themes using the latest version of Drupal 8,
- Drupal 8 Theming with Twig.
Another method that can support your learning is attending the events. The biggest one is DrupalCon which gathers the users and companies related to this CMS from all around the world. It offers sessions for the developers at different levels. However, there are also many local events like DrupalCamp Poland.
Finally, the fastest way to become a Drupal developer is to join our team and learn from the best experts who will be your mentors.