10 Drupal Tools Everyone in the Drupal Industry should be Using

Drupal Development is like a Cooking Game. Usually, we use main ingredients like Drupal core, contributed modules and themes, after that we get a recipe: create views, content types, and custom modules.  So the final result depends on our techniques, tools and our own things.

There are following tools which everyone should use in Drupal.

1. Drush:

Drush is a command line shell and scripting interface for installing, developing and maintaining Drupal websites. I love “Drush” because this provides us to download, install, uninstall and update Drupal module in minimum time from the command line. If you are using this then it will save your time.

Drupal+shell = Drush

There are few following important commands:

2. Administration Menu:

The menu is theme independent, CSS-based drop down style menu, Unnecessary page loads, and clicks which will save your time by not navigating to page to page to open an admin page. This is also a very important tool of Drupal which everyone should be using.

3. Devel:

Devel mostly used by a Developer which saves his time and most important tool. It is built for the debugging code; create content and sort of development task. Devel use dpm() function in your code you can print out arrays, objects, and other  items.

4. Drupal for FIREBUG:

There are following tips for firebug:

1. Drupal debugging through the browser console.
2. Provide insight into node, form, user objects
3. Works with Devel module to display SQL queries and execute PHP from browser

5. Backup and Migrate:

When you have important data on your website then this is always a concern that my data should be safe and so you need Backup and Migrate module. Your host may provide you an option to do that but in some cases this not free but when you are using this module this is 100% free and easy to use it. Backup and Migrate Module is used to backup your database. It is integrated with Drush, allowing you to backup your database by simply below command:

# drush bam-backup

6. Coder:

This is a very important module and every Drupal coder should use this because it will help you to maintain the quality of your Drupal Coding Standard and this very important to maintain quality. If we are working using Drupal then we should keep in mind that we have to follow Drupal way.  When first time I was writing a module in Drupal there was not such module and I was getting issues but after many iterations I fixed those but now you can use this for your coding standard. I have used this and this was very helpful for me. It has two sub-modules, Coder Upgrade and Coder Review. Coder Upgrade provides functionality for the user to upgrade themes or module to a newer version. Coder Review verifies a module for coding standards of Drupal it has or not. I would suggest this module for beginners, who are new in Drupal.

7. Version Control:

This is not only for Drupal but this very important when more than one person is working on the same codebase. So in this case, you can use version control like GIT, SVN etc… Like drupal.org itself is using GIT.

8. Features:

This is extraordinary Tool build in Drupal as a module. The main purpose of the features module is to copy configuration setups to file system called “Feature”. This file system builds a new module that can be installed on another site.

When we create a Drupal website, configure settings are stored in the database, which is very difficult to capture. Feature module provides these facilities you to export Drupal configuration settings to file system. Feature module creates a module file.

Feature module provides a UI to export content like content type, views, taxonomy etc. And build them as components to a single feature module. The Feature module is a Great Tool of Drupal.

9. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs):

IDEs provide more ability of text editor. There are some IDEs that work with PHP and Drupal.

1. Eclipse: It is free, open source IDEs for Linux, Mac, Windows and other Java.
2. Netbeans: It is cross-platform IDE with full PHP and debugging support. It is also a free and open source for Linux, Mac, and Windows etc.
3. PhpStorm.

10. Drupal Project Lookup:

It is a Chrome extension that saves more time when we search a project on drupal.org; you need to type dpl with the project name in this time-saving tool for Drupal.

This article is written by Sumit Kumar. He is an expert Drupal developer at Developmenticon a Drupal Development Services Company  who holds the competent skills in Drupal and its related terminologies. He is passionate about writing & sharing blogs that help in resolving various issues. Follow him: Facebook | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn.