Audience
This course is for anyone wanting to get started as a drupal developer. You want to understand and write code for drupal.
You need to know the basics of site building and how to setup a development environment.
Value
With this course you can start to write your own modules. It will help you to customize certain things in Drupal that can’t be done with contributed modules. Or you’ll be able to make your own modules to contribute on drupal.org.
Knowing how a modules is structured and which files it contains is one thing, but using the hook system and integrating with the APIs in Drupal is another. It will give you great control on your website.
After following this course you’ll know how to write secure and clean Drupal code. This will also help you when selecting modules. You’ll be able to check if the maintainer is using the Drupal API.
Your developers will be able to modify existing functionality and they will be able to create new powerful functionality. By having them to learn the basics of module development and the best practices you can be assured that they will know how to write proper code that requires less maintenance.
You will be able to save a lot of money on R&D because figuring out something on your own, while being very effective, it sure takes a longer time to acquire.
Examples & cases
Agencies need to install drupal product websites that are pretty simple and require mostly theming jobs so they have juniors and themers in their ranks to do the job. But almost every project a client asks: “Can you modify this structural thing” or “can you do this custom thing here”. After this course your developers will be able to modify these small things. And they will do it right.
You have bought a drupal site from an agency or you have built it yourself and you want to be able to modify small things without having to call on expensive developers. Learn to do small modifications and save a ton on development costs.
Contents
PHP basics
First things first! Learn the PHP basics before we dive into Drupal development.
Basic hook implementations
Learn about the Drupal hook system and how to use it.
Major API use
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Form API
Build forms in your modules by using the form API in Drupal.
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Menu – router API
Make your own menu items in code.
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Database
Learn how to execute queries or perform updates on Drupal’s database.
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Variables
Drupal works with variables. How to manipulate them?
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User API
Use the proper functions to interact with user objects.
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Node API
Learn everything about functions to interact with nodes.
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Blocks
Use the API to create blocks in code.
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Filter
There are different text format filters in Drupal. How to work with those.
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Taxonomy
Learn how to interact with vocabularies and taxonomy terms.
- Caching
We’ll show you which functions to use to cache data in Drupal.
jQuery
jQuery is included in Drupal core. We’ll show how to use existing jQuery functionality and how to include your own scripts.
Best practices
Drupal has its own coding standards. Besides those we’ll show you how to code the Drupal way.
ROI
How to calculate ROI?
Developer based
If it takes a developer to figure out the knowledge presented in this course it would probably take him around one month. If in that one month he had to learn on the job and started coding. He probably figured out that what he has written until then could use some refactoring. Mostly there is no time to do this. If you let your average developer who is billable at 400€/day work for a month on a Drupal project that needs custom code you will save multiple time the training fee in just one month.
On a project with a budget of 20k having your developer use less than 10% of that budget to seriously learn Drupal is definitely worth it. Not only does letting the Drupal developer enroll in training assure you that the project will have the right quality it will also assure you that the developer will be a lot faster too. Allowing you to deploy him on new profitable projects. On just the course of just one project you’ll have earned the training fee back multiple times.