Some Critical Tools for Professional Drupal Developers Creating a Drupal theme from scratch is not an easy task by any means; so is the process involved in developing, managing and suitably maintaining a Drupal website. A lot of challenges & adventure is involved in developing Drupal sites. Complexities exist at different levels; whether its about debugging, or related to conceptualizing Drupal as an MVC framework as given below.
However, there is a large community of professionals who work night & day to fix challenges & issues related to Drupal. Using the Correct Drupal Development Tools is Important... No matter what the complexity is; availability of Drupal development tools renders the task a lot easier. Using the right set of development tools can create a huge difference in the way you create the final Drupal solution. Here we bring for you the 4 critical tools that you can use for Effective Drupal website development. Using these tools, you would experience increased productivity, decreased development time and most importantly reduced frustrations.
A Deeper Look into the Available Drupal Tools... Most used Drupal development module for almost all sorts of development tasks is Devel. Search Krumo is another module useful while navigating through massive array structures; and it must be noted that Drupal 7 is mainly about big arrays. Its these modules that serve as the solution for debugging variables effectively in Drupal. Another use of Devel module is in content generation. You can generate terms, taxonomy, nodes and more using it series of sub-modules. It can also be used for PHP code execution in Drupal environment. Another awesome tool for Drupal is Drush; a command line tool that effectively increased speed of many tasks. It allows you perform several Drupal tasks with good efficiency from the command line. You need to know certain commands if you want to make the most out of using Drush. One of the greatest aspects related with Drush is that you can declare commands on your own, thereby exposing some custom functionality to command line too. Xdebug is a highly efficient module that even leaves Devel module far behind when it comes to debugging. All you need doing is to set it up and then position a break-point in your code followed by loading your site page. At the break point, execution will stop and you will have access to plenty of contextual information, including all global & scope variables. Precisely, these are some tools that will make your Drupal development much easier.