I talked about Best Practices for Drupal Developers @ Drupal Camp India 2008 held on DAIICT Campus in Gandhinagar, on August 08-10.

2. BEST PRACTICES FOR DRUPAL DEVELOPERS DrupalCamp India August 8/9/10, 2008 Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology Gandhinagar, IN

3. We shall be covering -Best practices for - development environment - module development - theme development - some other stuff

4. Get the source Start out with the CVS checkout ALWAYS ” CVS chekout instruction are available on http://drupal.org/handbooks ”

7. revision control your project -Even if: - it is a small project - only you are working on it - Take a pick - svn, bzr, git, darcs ... - VSS(if you are crazy enough) - BUT NOT CVS('coz drupal uses it) the benifits are way too many!

8. The Editor Wars - Komodo Edit/IDE my favourite - Scribes on GNOME my other favourite - PHPEclipse or Eclipse PDT - Qunta Plus on KDE - TextMate on Mac OS X - What? Windows? Are You Kidding? ;)

9. MODULE DEVELOPMENT UNDERSTAND ALL THE PREREQUISITES THROUGHLY

10. Drupal DB Schema is the most important fundamental - Most importantly, understand: - how content/comments are stored - how taxonomy is stored - how users/ACL is stored

11. you can't escape the hook Drupal has hooks for everything You can use hooks for: - CRUD operations - modifying anything(almost) at runtime - path/routes definitions - cron tasks, forms, schema definitions - and much much more...

12. and do I need to say - That you should know: - PHP - Bsic RDBMS concepts & SQL - Good Programming Style - Software Design Skills - learn that from Drupal ;)

13. so you want to code a new module Let's ask a few questions

14. Question #1 Is there are a contributed module that has the functionality I need? If Yes, use it. PERIOD.

15. Question #2 Is there any contributed module that does something similar to I need? If yes, use it, switch off the other functions, if possible

16. Question #3 Can I adapt any contributed module to do what I need? If yes, adapt it.

17. code your modules when you need to DON'T FORCE A DONKEY TO RUN A DERBY NEITHER FORCE A STALLION TO PULL A CART

18. If you need a new content type CCK will save you lot of time

19. with CCK, use VIEWS a simplified Crystal Reports for Drupal.

20. when writing modules, you will be... - Creating Forms - Receiving input - Doing SQL stuff - Outputing strings - containing text, html and other content

21. Learn and understand Form API Form API has lot of benifits - Define forms in PHP syntax - Drupal will generate correct HTML - Makes form aterable at runtime - Makes programatic submission possible

22. filter out that evil input with check_plain($string) makes sure $string is plain text and filters out those clever scripts and malicious html

24. Drupal has a very powerfull input filter system. LEARN IT – USE IT No Excuses

25. Learn to construct good SQL. PERIOD. Time to go back to basic RDBMS books

31. modules and html REMEMBER Don't output HTML directly from modules BUT DON'T MAKE IT A RELIGION

33. one more tip NEVER NEVER NEVER use print statemets from inside function AJAX callbacks are exceptions but don't forget to exit() after print

34. THEMES - Learn and be strong at - HTML/CSS - Javascript/jQuery - Basic graphic design - use GIMP, Inkscape - understand difference between svn and png

35. always use PHPTemplate - Default theme engine since v4.7 - Simple to learn and easy to use - Made for Drupal, by Drupal [people] - Uses our own PHP for templating - No new language to learn (die smarty die)

36. use some base theme - well tested - basic stuff is ready - some even have a framework(zen) - you can use zen, framework, base, clean, igniter, etc etc,

37. do you have a separate designer? - Ask him to - take a look at Drupal generated HTML - learn the id/classes generated by Drupal - learn basics of PHP and Drupal FireBug can help here. http://getfirebug.com

38. avoid complex logic in tpl.php - Templates are for html not for logic - Remeber: - no SQL in templates - no complex logic in templates - on basic branching and looping more than 2 levels of nesting is ALARM ALARM SITUATION

39. Other useful stuff - Follow coding standards - coder module can help - its has other tons of features - use devel module - to profile queries - inspect redirects - generate test data/users/taxonomy - debug themes(drupal 6) - and more

40. drush – drupal swiss army knife - drush = drupal shell - unix scripting interface to drupal - API to build command line tools - a package manager, SQL Tools and ToolBox - Build your own tools and utilities

41. there is a lot left to cover Let that be some other time

42. Thank You - any questions? ?