Drupal is a fantastic CMS system, with lots of functionality and security systems for any aspiring enterprise. Drupal development in Australia is booming, and there is a need for more Drupal developers than ever before. Below, we’ve listed a few tips that all Drupal newbies need to know before they can start working on the big clients.

1. Understand The Platform

When starting with any new CMS platform (not just Drupal), it’s critical to ensure you have familiarity with the functionality at play. It’s crucial to understand the different functions of the CMS as well as how to work within the platform itself. Each CMS platform is unique, so understanding how Drupal itself works (as opposed to applying WordPress/Kentico/Joomla functionality to the platform) is most important.

2. Template Principles

The principles of templating are imperative when it comes to Drupal, allowing you to pick up and work with new frameworks with minimal disruption. Whether using Mustache, Twig, Jade or templating syntax within Angular, there is a raft of similarities between the syntax and the principles that can be applied to each language allowing you to quickly move from one to another with a faster pick-up process.

3. Package Managers

Package managers are critical to the implementation of Drupal, whether using Sass or Bootstrap or Drush. Understanding how each package manager works and what you are running before setting up any commands is critical to ensure you don’t set anything up incorrectly.

4. Versioning

Versioning and version control is something that every developer should have experience in. Versioning is the best way to ensure that each of your Drupal projects is clearly and consistently managed and maintained, while version control helps to manage client projects internally as well.

5. Command Line Interface

Knowing how to use the command line interface is a useful part of any Drupal development in Australia. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert, but command line interface skills allow you to be more productive. You can automate repetitive tasks, complete tasks without the need to move from different applications and can use a raft of tools to help performance tasks instantaneously.

6. Framework Understanding

With headless CMS becoming somewhat of a catchcry in development circles, headless Drupal is something that developers should be aware of. Usually, these headless Drupal setups take advantage of front-end frameworks including Angular, Backbone or Ember. Knowing how to manage these, and that most of these frameworks are almost exclusively written in Javascript and use templates, reinforces point two quite convincingly.

7. Code Testing

Knowing how to test your own code, and which tests to use, is crucial. From TTD to BDD, you can develop your own tests to cover classes, with linting to ensure that you are writing standardised code. Ultimately, you want to ensure that your code is navigable for others and set-up using best practice methods.

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