Programmer's Guide to Drupal

Chapter 5. Programming Tools and Tips

As you launch yourself into (or continue) what will hopefully be many productive years as a Drupal programmer, I hope that you will continue to keep the principles of Chapter 2 in mind and avoid the mistakes listed in Chapter 3. You should be able to keep returning to Chapter 4 and outside references such as the Examples for Developers project (http://drupal.org/project/examples) for examples and ideas. And for further study, there are suggestions sprinkled throughout this book and in Where to Find More Information.

In closing, I’d like to offer a few final programming tips and suggest a few development tools that you should find useful in your endeavors.

Drupal Development Tools

The Drupal community has developed several very useful development tools that can help you avoid making programming mistakes, adhere to the Drupal coding standards, and debug your Drupal sites and Drupal code. Here is a list of the most useful development tools:

Coder

A set of modules that points out coding errors and violations of the Drupal coding standards, and also helps you upgrade your code from one Drupal version to another. Some developers have, in the past, preferred to use the Drupal Code Sniffer project, which has now been merged into the Coder project. (http://drupal.org/project/coder)

Devel

A set of modules containing a number of helpful functions for debugging and developing modules and themes, as well as a fake lorem ipsum content generator for testing. ...