Dani Nordin - Drupal Development Tricks for Designers

Copyright 2012 Dani Nordin

OReilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (.

Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the OReilly logo are registered trademarks of OReilly Media, Inc. Drupal Development Tricks for Designers , the cover image of a springer spaniel, and related trade dress are trademarks of OReilly Media, Inc.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and OReilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

I realize the idea of learning how to use the command line, or set up a local development environment, isnt as sexy as learning how to push the envelope of Drupal design. Trust me, I get it. But if theres one thing that prevents Drupal designers from pushing that envelope, its this: site building in Drupal isnt as efficient if you havent figured out at least a few of these tricks . Want to know why the same task takes some developers an hour or two, while it takes some of us several hours of banging our heads against the computer? Its because they know how to quickly update their modules, or how to use version control (hallelujah!) to protect themselves from bonehead mistakes.

The goal of this guide isnt to show you everything that you can possibly do to make development easier for yourself, or to provide a comprehensive guide to everything a given development tool can do; the list is entirely too long, and if youre anything like me, youll get halfway down the list before you start wondering where your coffee is and forget you ever looked at it. My goal here is simple: to help you figure out how much of this stuff you need to make repetitive tasks in Drupal take less time . The rest, you can figure out once you get the hang of it.

As you read through these pages, you might note that the instructions I provide here are focused on the Mac platform. Although I dont want to ignore my friends on Windows, most of what Ive learned about working with Drupalparticularly the command line stuffsimply works more efficiently on the Mac platform. Unfortunately, Windows adds a rather annoying layer of complexity to most of the command line stuff that youll see in these pages. Dear friends in the community have tried several times to work in Git and Drush on Windows, and all have fought with their machines for hours on end to get their configurations running. This complexity has led many of the developers I know to forgo Windows altogether and get things done on Mac or Ubuntu.

If you do, however, prefer Windows, you can use a program like .