Experience of Learning Drupal on a web front-end

Talk about front-end learning

After I graduated from college, my first job mainly focused on the maintenance of the company's website, including content update and website revision.

When I graduated, I basically only knew simple html. At that time, table layout was quite popular, and everything was table, and I was not skilled. At that time, I learned some basics of PS and flash because of my interest at school. At the same time, I also offered a one-semester course on creating web pages, which is only the basis for creating web pages, there is still a long way to go before we can write Web pages independently.

Because of the first job, we set foot on the road of website development. With the accumulation of work and study, I gradually become addicted to the front-end, because as long as I simply write some HTML and CSS, I can immediately see the effect.

As a front-end developer, it is necessary to master the basic HTML and CSS skills. Of course, this is only the foundation, and many other technologies need to be learned, such as JavaScript, the latest HTML5, CSS3, Sass, and some front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap and mobile terminals. However, you do not need to be afraid. You must be step-by-step and down-to-earth in learning.

In fact, no matter what you learn, it is important to master the learning method, learn the front-end, learn Drupal, and learn the language.

Learning new things is basically a combination of theory and practice. For example, when I first learned CSS, I read the second version of Li Chao's "CSS website layout record" twice, and then I started to refer to the example on the reference book and tap the code, it can increase confidence and turn theory into an instance. After a period of work, you can basically get rid of books and manually knock on the code. Then we can use a small project for practice. At that time, a friend just wanted to build a website. I just studied CMS for a while, so I helped him build a simple site and then imitated a site on the front end, the first practical work has been completed. Although this site has already been deprecated, it will never be forgotten for me, because it is a cornerstone of my journey forward.

Then, I made one or two projects, including the Company's website revision and the building of my blog. I wrote the actual code while writing the code. I found the problem and solved the problem.
Learning about Drupal

With the front-end Foundation of HTML and CSS, I plan to change my job and officially devote myself to the front-end development business.

I was lucky enough to have my first job in Shanghai. The company's projects were mainly developed based on Drupal. At first, the company's boss was a company owned by several returnees. The Boss grew up in the United States and received many Western educational ideas, including some excellent technologies. After returning to China, I started some companies. Several projects were developed using Drupal, which was still in the Drupal5 era.

The learning methods of Drupal vary depending on your professional background, experience, and thinking.

Let's talk about my learning experience:

In 2008, the mature and stable version was Drupal5.x, and Drupal's Chinese materials were scarce. There was only one first version of Drupal Professional Development Guide (5.x), which was translated by laoge, lao GE is called the Evangelist in the Chinese community of Drupal. My main job is to focus on Drupal front-end development, so my learning focus is on topic development. At that time, there was no PHP foundation, but I learned about variables, statements, and simple functions by looking at them.

When the team initially cooperated, everyone had no experience and made many detours in the development process and method. Although it can be implemented, the method is still not good. For example:

At that time, the Content Templates (Contemplate) (link is external) module was used to write html, variables, and some functions in node;
At the beginning of the project, instead of creating a new theme, we used a theme downloaded from the official website. The interface looks a little similar to the project's effect. In fact, we can find it when using it, the workload for subsequent modifications will be larger.
Create a static page and insert it into Drupal. This will lead to a lot of repetitive work. For example, we need to modify the CSS of the static page according to the class and id generated by Drupal. Although we can use the theme function and template override to modify most of Drupal's structures to achieve the same as static pages, this requires a lot of work and a lot of projects, there is no need to care about the structure of html. Of course, if the project budget is sufficient, this overwrite will also be done. For general projects, we recommend the first feature and then create the topic.

To sum up, you can take the following steps as a front-end to learn Drupal:

Build a local WAMP environment. Recommended integration environments: XAMPP and Acquia Dev Desktop
Install Drupal (installation tutorial method 1 and method 2)
Familiar with Drupal interface operations and common terms (learn more about Drupal)
Learn to install third-party themes and modules
Let's take a look at the topic development chapter in the third edition of Drupal Professional Development Guide and the topic Development Manual on the official website.
Use the Drupal7 core bartik or Garland as the base topic to write a topic.
You can manually write a topic without using any basic topic.
Master common template override functions

Beyond the topic:

Principles of Drupal hook
Preparations for module development
Manually write a module

You can also take a look at my previous Drupal learning outline. One-point sharing is for reference only.

After seven years of development, although I have already left the original company, it continues because of the indissoluble bond with Drupal.

I hope that through this article, I will give you some suggestions and hope that you can share your learning experience and help later.