Drupal is a content management system and a web development platform. With a small set of core modules and a large ecosystem of community contributed modules, it can be used fro a variety of use cases including corporate intranets, social web applications, online publishing, and education or government websites. In this talk, we’ll cover the benefits of using Drupal for developers, and how to use and extend Drupal as a web development framework. Besides being open source and having an active development-driven community, Drupal has many architectural advantages. We’ll discuss these benefits including the hook system, separation of theme and module layers, the emphasis on flexible content architecture, the database integration layer, and Drupal’s coding standards. We’ll also introduce some tools to get you started on the right track, improve the performance of your Drupal projects, and avoid mistakes.

1. Drupal as a
Programmer-Friendly
CMS
Suzanne Kennedy
Co-founder
@evolvingweb

2. About Me
• Drupal consulting,
development, and
training
• Help organizations
build awesome
Drupal sites + apps
• Specialize in
multilingual Drupal
and Apache Solr

3. What Can You Build
with Drupal?

4. Build an Engagement Platform

5. Publish Lots of Content

6. Multilingual Content

7. Flexible Content Architecture

8. Flexible Theme Layer

9. Fancy Search UI

10. Intranets

11. Web Applications

12. Drupal as a CMS

13. Nodes
Nodes are basic content building blocks

14. Content Types
Nodes can have different fields + settings
Event Blog Post
• Date • Author + Date
• Location Published
• Description • Body Text
• Signup List • Comments

15. Node Settings

16. Fields

17. Revisions

18. Taxonomy

19. Taxonomy
Vocabulary
Terms
Child Terms

22. Taxonomy + Fields

23. Menus

24. Roles

25. Permissions

26. Blocks

28. Themes

30. Modules

31. Specific Modules

32. API-Style Modules
Voting API Rules

33. API-Style Modules
Flag API

34. Custom Modules

35. Custom > Contrib

36. Administrative UI

37. Multilingual
Content Translation UI Translation

38. Multilingual

39. Drupal as a
Framework

40. Content
Architecture

41. Entity Type
Bundles
Entities

42. Entity Types
Entity types are classes that define content
Content Users Taxonomy Comments
Content title D. Schrute
adventure Wow, can't
Germany city breakwait to get
dwight
city break 8 Sept started.
J. Halpert
Spain sailing
joe Me too!
shopping 8 Sept

43. Custom Entity Types
You can define custom entity types

44. Entity API

45. CRUD for Entities
Editing a Editing a Node
Department Entity

46. Custom Fields

47. Custom Form Widgets

48. Custom Formatters

49. Views

50. Lists of Content

51. Defining Lists

52. Contextual Filters

53. External Data
Sources

54. Custom Table
Query
Custom Activity Table Activity Stream View

55. Features

56. Configuration = Messy
Text
Illustration: drupal.org/node/580026

57. Bundles of Config
Features
Contrib
Core

58. Features

59. Components

60. Exportables
• Content Types • WYSIWYG Profiles
• Fields • Configuration
• Menus • Rules
• Taxonomy • Flags Logic
• Views • Roles
• Image Styles • Permissions

61. Configuration > Code
Views Configuration
Views in Code

62. Benefits of Features
• Stability of the site
• Version control
• Better development workflow
• Distribute to other sites

63. Distributions
OpenPublish
Commons
Conference (COD)

64. How Does Drupal
Work?

65. Serving a Request

66. Drupal Bootstrap
The steps that
Drupal
bootstrap
carries out
when a page
request is
called.

67. Drupal Menu System
How does Drupal know what to render?

68. Drupal Hook System

69. How hooks are
implemented
Any module can implement a hook as follows:
function <module_name>_<hook_name>(args) {
//possibly alter an argument
//possibly return something
}

70. Example: hook_init()
/**
* Implementation of hook_init()
*
* Do stuff on the front page
*/
function my_module_init() {
if (drupal_is_front_page()) {
drupal_set_message('Front page message!');
}
}

71. Alter Hooks
• Modify data generated in other
modules before it gets rendered
• Examples:
• hook_form_alter()
• hook_mail_alter()
• hook_menu_alter()
• hook_menu_link_alter()

72. Form API - benefits
• No more HTML generation!
• Data validation
• Security checks, caching
• Code reuse (custom elements, form
altering)
• AJAX

73. Without it...

74. Defining form
structure
• Structured arrays
define all settings
and attributes
• All standard
HTML input
elements
available

75. Defining form
structure
• Array keys
starting with '#'
are specific
form api
attributes
• All others are
child form
elements

76. Required Select Box

77. Multiselect with default

78. Submission
• Simple '#type' =>
'submit' element
• Submit buttons can
have their own
submit function,
allowing different
buttons to do
different things in a
simple way.

79. Drupal Theme System
1. Load the Theme 2. Preprocess the HTML 3. Display Templates

80. Things Developers
Like

81. Drush

82. Coding Standards
http://drupal.org/coding-standards

83. Devel

84. Services Module
Hello! Hello!
iPad, iPhone Apps Desktop Applications
Hello!
Android Apps Other Drupal Sites

85. Other Things
Developers Like
• Database Abstraction
• Caching
• Unit Testing (Simple Test)
• Renderable Arrays
• Multisite

86. Drupal.org for
Developers

87. Projects on Drupal.org

88. Drupal.org Issue Queue

89. Git Integration

90. Security Team

91. Documentation

92. More Reasons to
Use Drupal

93. Drupal is in Demand!

94. Drupal is Open Source!

95. Drupal Community

96. We’re Hiring
Developers
Sysadmins
Project Managers
evolvingweb.ca/careers

97. Drupal Training
Drupal for Developers
March 30th
Drupal Layout &
Theming
May 24-25th
evolvingweb.ca/training

98. Thank You!
Suzanne Kennedy
@evolvingweb