What You Should Know About a Career in Drupal

Firstly, here’s a few key things you should know:

Drupal is an Open Source CMF (CMS), initially released in 2001.

Drupal is a widely used and secure

Drupal is a very popular Open Source CMS solution. According to BuiltWith, 6% of top 10k Websites that use a CMS use Drupal. The total number of Drupal websites is more than a million. Popular and well-known sites such as Whitehouse.gov, Nbc.com and Weather.com are using Drupal

Drupal is not just a CMS

The functionality of Drupal exceeds what is defined as a CMS. When describing Drupal as a CMS within the Drupal community, I often get corrected that it is in fact a CMF (Content Management Framework). It means that Drupal can be used for other purposes such as simply working as the backend system for entering content, and then displaying the content in a completely different way. This could be for example a mobile application that gets its content from your Drupal website.

Drupal is fast to develop

Building the basic functionalities of complex sites often requires no custom code. This makes Drupal fast to develop. Handling content with different fields which can contain whatever data you as content creators want and being able to change these in a very quick way is Drupal’s one of main strengths. Building your own “content type” takes minutes and not a single line of code.

The Custom code comes in play when you need something very specific and is often only used to add to alter or add to already existing code. This makes Drupal into a great tool for creating a Proof of Concept quickly. If you have a complex website that you need built, it is very likely that Drupal is the fastest way to provide the basic functionalities. In a short time you could already be demonstrating the main functionalities to your shareholders or peers.

Drupal has a large number of contributed modules

Drupal Modules are free to use and generally of high quality. Drupal’s functionality can be extended in using contributed modules. A great Drupal website is always a combination of the best modules for the specific purpose of the website. Joomla and WordPress have paid module ecosystems and many of the good modules you have to pay for, with Drupal they are all freely available on Drupal.org. However not just everyone can release anything to Drupal.org which is where all the contributed modules live. To release a module, developers have to go through a process where your code is evaluated by long-term Drupal developers this goes a long way to keep the standards high.

There is a large number of modules that we as Drupal developers and enthusiasts find very standard, but are missing or hard to configure in other CMS’s.

Get to know the key words

Core vs. Modules vs. Plugins – The Drupal core is a framework for building websites, web applications, databases and more. Each of the aspects people expect from a CMS (WYSIWYG, Themes and Templates, etc.) are obtained through modules. Modules are the shippable coded building blocks that attach to the core and deliver higher level functionality to users. Plugins are specific pieces of code called hooks that function as their own calls within Drupal.

Nodes – Nodes are the functional parts of Drupal which store and retrieve content. Besides comments, nodes contain every discrete form of content on a site. A survey, picture, blog post, page body, poll, or shopping item are all types of nodes.

Blocks – A part of the Drupal core, blocks are the areas on a website where widgets appear on other CMS systems. Blocks are not limited in functionality or form like a widget is though, and most content on a Drupal site will be presented in blocks.

Content Type – Content types on a Drupal site are defined by the nodes used for storing the content and the blocks used to deliver content to the end user. Because of the generic nature of nodes and blocks, a website may have as many types of content as a business owner needs and a developer produces. Online courses, store items, blogs, pages, shopping carts, pictures, polls and more are some of the possible content types you can use for your customers on Drupal.

Brian on Building a career on Drupal

I began working with the Internet back in 1995, and within a year sold and built the first website for one of our customers then becoming the de-facto web lead. While in this position I worked on many websites including projects for RMIT and Cadbury.

In 2000 I moved on to Wesley College as Web Architect where I started working with Cold Fusion and database driven web technology, while here I create my own CMS And probably the world first K-12 Intranet that was accessible by parents.

In late 2005 I decided to move on from Wesley and had been keeping a keen eye on the trend toward open source. If I was trying to sell a site to smaller clients, I needed to think about eliminating licencing costs.

The first public Drupal site I built was for a company that no longer exists, it was an outdoor adventure shop and a lot of deviation from Drupal best practices occurred, however the agency I was working for at the time was extremely happy with how closely I translated the visual design and the functionality of the site.

Around 2007 I became web manager of the Monash University Facilities and Services Division, where I re built a new public web presence and highly functional Intranet using Drupal.

Since the early 2000’s I had also been moonlighting first using Cold Fusion, then using Drupal. In 2011 as the side projects were for large and larger clients I thought it was time to own my own business.

Within 3 months of taking Realityloop full time I employed our Lead Developer and we have built a name for the company through contributions to the local and international Drupal community, Best Practice Drupal Development, and prolific module contributions on Drupal.org.

Drupalcon Melbroune, Sprinters workshop

Our team enjoy the variation in projects we get to work on, and given we primarily work from our respective homes, and with 2 RDO’s/month they also enjoy the work life balance that Realityloop provides.

Drupal has grown and grown since it’s inception, and when I look critically at propriety CMS’s – the development team might be 10-100 developers. I don’t believe they can compete with Drupal, where for the core product you have over 3000 contributors with all of that code getting reviewed by multiple people before being added to the project.

Between my colleagues and myself here at Realityloop, we’ve contributed over 100 modules on Drupal.org. As a comparison, we’ve seen companies that have 50 staff – and in total contribute only 5 modules.

In the Drupal community, people are extremely strong on security – the White House use Drupal. It has to stack up.

For the Realityloop team community involvement is paramount, if no-one contributes, Drupal will eventually cease to be relevant – It thrives off public contribution and the community is large and diverse.

I’ve fixed issues on Several Drupal project websites including the main Drupal website and groups.drupal.org  I was a content reviewer for “The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7” book by APress, my Drupal 8 contributions saw me ranked at 11% out of 3000 contributors, And I have led the First Time Sprinters workshops for over 1500 first time sprinters at numerous local and international conferences.