Drupal Development Tricks for Designers

Take your Drupal skills even further with valuable tricks for making site building truly efficient. In this concise guide—the third in a series by award-winning designer Dani Nordin—you’ll learn how to set up your own development environment, quickly update your modules, and use version control to protect yourself from bonehead mistakes.

Handle repetitive tasks with ease, avoid hours of frustration, and devote more time to pushing the envelope of Drupal design—just by picking up the basics of a few developer tools. It’s much more than simple coding; it’s real, honest-to-goodness developer Ninja Magick.

• Learn basic commands and use them in Drupal on the command line
• Set up your local development environment, and learn ways to collaborate on code with others
• Download modules, themes, libraries, and more with Drush, the Drupal shell
• Use Git, the free version control system, and create a GitHub account
• Pack content types, views, and other functionality you use often into a custom module with Features

Dani Nordin is the founder and principal designer of the zen kitchen, where you'll find tasty marketing and design ideas with an eco-friendly twist. She has over 10 years of experience designing award-winning work for small to large businesses and non-profits.