Drupal Development Tricks for Designers

Preface

In the first guide, Planning and Managing Drupal Projects, we walked through the process of planning a site, figuring out the user experience, and working with content architecture. In the second, Design and Prototyping in Drupal, we started looking at how to create solid, user-centered design that works for a Drupal site, and how to allow Drupal’s default behavior to guide your design decisions without defaulting to making a site look “Drupally.”

In this guide, Drupal Development Tricks for Designers, we start looking at just a little bit of real, honest-to-goodness, developer Ninja Magick. I’m going to share what I’ve learned over years of building Drupal sites about setting up a development environment, getting yourself ready to collaborate on code with others, and other ways to make site building easier so you can focus on design.

Wait, What? Why?

I realize the idea of learning how to use the command line, or set up a local development environment, isn’t as sexy as learning how to push the envelope of Drupal design. Trust me, I get it. But if there’s one thing that prevents Drupal designers from pushing that envelope, it’s this: site building in Drupal isn’t as efficient if you haven’t figured out at least a few of these tricks. Want to know why the same task takes some developers an hour or two, while it takes some of us several hours of banging our heads against the computer? It’s because they know how to quickly update their modules, or how to use version control (hallelujah!) ...