Pragmatic Drupal Development John Fiala Developer

Pragmatic? prag·mat·ic –adjective Also, prag·mat·i·cal ( for defs. 1, 2, 5 ). 1. of or pertaining to a practical point of view or practical considerations.

What makes a Pragmatic Programmer? ● Early adopter / Fast Adapter ● Inquisitive ● Critical Thinker ● Realistic ● Jack of all trades – Even developers need to know css, and themers need a little PHP

Care About Your Craft ● Don’t just DO Drupal. Live it. ● Contribute – Write Code – Write Documentation – Support / Help users in confusion – Present at Meetings – Help Run Meetings, Camps, Cons – Say Thank You

Think! About Your Work ● What are you doing? ● Why are you doing it that way? ● Why isn’t it working? ● Why is it working?

Don’t Write a New Module ● There are over 5,700 modules for Drupal 6, and over 1,700 for Drupal 7 ● If you need to do it, someone else already had to do it too. ● ● Look for drupal_alter(), module_implements(), module_invoke ● hook_form_alter

Use Views ● A big part of every site is lists of content on that site ● Views lets your client customize pages and blocks easily ● Views lets you set up the site quickly and makes you look good ● Worry about performance later unless obviously horrid

Avoid Premature Optimization ● Until you’ve got the site full of data and start using it, it’s very hard to figure out where it will be slow. ● So don’t – Do ‘good enough’ now, and fix the slow parts when they’re obviously slow. ● Don’t assume – use logging to see where the slow parts actually are.

Donald Knuth ● “Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance or considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%”

Build your Drupal Knowledge Portfolio ● “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest” – Benjamin Franklin ● New versions of Drupal are being developed ● New versions of modules and themes as well ● New modules that do things or simplify what you do ● Drush / Context / Features / Less

Let me be the 13,547 th person to recommend drush to you ● Just using ‘drush cc all’ during development of a site will save hours over the life of the project ● The more you use drush and get used to its features, the faster you work and the less time you’re delayed by waiting for the LAMP stack to respond ● And when the site is somehow borked, drush lets you fix it

Use Source Code Control ● Any project can go wrong. Code is deleted, you made a radical change to a routine and it didn't work, or you and Bob changed the same code at the same time. ● Or, god forbid, your laptop falls in Cherry Creek ● Use git, mercurial, svn, or even cvs ● Most can be used for free or no cost, and Drupal uses git so you might as well get used to it

Don't Code Alone ● If you're stuck on something for over 30 minutes, start looking for help.

Ask this friendly-looking Fellow

If He can't help - ask others ● Co-workers ● irc: freenode.net #drupal-colorado, #drupal- support, etc ● ● Webchat: ● Drupal.org Forums ● Google Search is your friend ● Twitter!

Automated Testing is Cool ● Simpletest ● Nailing down bits that work so they don't change by mistake

Learn Other Things ● Open Source works by Sharing - Help it Share! ● Wordpress ● Joomla ● Zend ● Other languages - Python/Django, Java/Spring

Questions/Objections? ?

Feedback / Contact John Fiala jcfiala on twitter jcfiala basically everywhere