48 Expert Drupal Development Tips – Worth Reading

Drupal is a free software package that allows you to easily organize, manage and publish your content, with an endless variety of customization. Drupal Developers must be looking for Tips, so here we have collected some of those. Read on to know the 48 Essential Drupal Development tips from the experts.

Expert Drupal Development Tips:

1. In order to provide a clear distinction for the customer modules to future developers, group all the available custom modules under a common “package” name in the list.
2. For identifying API changes in Drupal 6 to 7, employ the coder module.
3. The ‘user’ variable name implies to the user who is logged in at the time of code execution whereas the ‘account’ variable name will refer to the information for any other logged off user on the site.
4. Try to split your sites as well as all the modules into custom and contribute.
5. In order to detect a contributed module for any project, keep a track of the change that is brought in the patch file. Also, build a folder on your web site for storing all of the individual patch files as applicable.
6. Hook_menu() provides an index for the module describing its features. Therefore, it should be kept as the first function in the custom module.
7. You are allowed to employ any HTML in a particular theme function because the themes have been empowered to override the HTML.
8. To acquire a handy access of classes such as the “not_front”, “front” or “logged in” etc. , output the variable $body_classes in the attribute class of the body tag.
9. The admin or the block page does not employ any form of admin theme in order to support the block location helper overlay.
10. $tabs and $closure are the two elements which are commonly left from your page.tpl.php files.
11. The most fundamental way to theming is to simply copy the file you desire to create from the available code module folder and thus make the requisite changes.
12. In order to handle languages that use different order of the words, employ the placeholder tokens.
13. Drupal Developers allow you to recreate or remove any theme functions you have overridden earlier so as to include the missed code changes.
14. The usage of $content in node.tpl.php files can be avoided as per the convenience. Simply output every field individually.
15. To grab only the required data, instead of using the row style “nodes”, employ the style “Fields” on views.
16. In CakePHP, the dpm() function is out of the insanely useful pr() functions which offers you a clear output for the complex data in case of debugging.
17. The complete ‘variable’ table gets further loaded with each page load, therefor limit the storage in variables.
18. As most of the variable information is generally stored in the memory, the variable_get() function is free.
19. Avoid call t () on menu descriptions and titles as these are stored normally in the cache on build.
20. To add a tab such as the user or node to a page, employ MENU_LOCAL_TASK inside the hook_menu array.
21. In the menu array, use the ‘file’ attribute to move the large menu items to the inc files.
22. The Drupal will immediately call node_load or user_load on the available passed in IDs for using the node% and user% in the array.
23. The Drupal Developers allows you to create and use your own individual magic handler.
24. At times in addition to your page, the entire site cache might appear to come to a stop.
25. In order to determine if a site belong to Drupal, simply look for the expiry date of the page in the headers.
26. You can do routes in Drupal through the custom_URL_rewrite_outbound() and the custom_url_rewrite_inbound().
27. It is always recommended to use the appropriate data type for CCK: Date (iso date).
28. The form array keys start with a pounding sign so as to allow for the nesting of elements in that array.
29. The ‘clicked_button’ has been added to handle images in the form.
30. A particular format is employed to set the error in a nested field.
31. form_error() is one of the most cleanest and logically formatted errors.
32. Drupal can ignore any specified redirects and can also rebuild any form.
33. To switch between or change the database connections, use db_set_active().
34. To access any database table of the Drupal views, employ the Table Wizard module.
35. Never specify a set value on any of the form elements.
36. Make sure the functions you use are applicable to both the Drupal 6 as well as Drupal 7 version.
37. Until the browser has finished loading the code, the inline JavaScript restricts the browser for the meantime.
38. A visual API reference to jQuery is the VisualjQuery.com
39. Using “>>>” at the bottom part of any console tab runs the JavaScript you type in.
40. If the browsers are not provided with ‘href’ attributes, then they might even strip out the A tags.
41. While looking for a class, make sure to specify the tag names for a faster research.
42. Instead of using the entire selector again, prefer using ‘$’ inside the function.
43. Export your views and install in the custom module for an easy management.
44. To push the chief site configuration variations, use hook_update() in an empty function.
45. The data stored in the template layer is the safest.
46. You can use the Drush function to install all the current and latest versions of Drupal.
47. Serving data from the cache can reduce the overall database hits.
48. Try using the cache_set() and the cache_get() functions as often as feasible.

Hope you’ve learnt a lot from these Expert Drupal Development Tips.

About The Author

Robin

Robin has been working with the Drupal Developers for fifteen years. His blog is dedicated to several fantastic tips relating to Drupal Development.

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