Learning and keeping up with Drupal
Learning Drupal Basics
- Drupal User Guide on drupal.org for people with minimal knowledge of Drupal - Updated Jan 2024 - This guide was written mainly for people with minimal knowledge of the Drupal content management system. The topics will help them become skilled at installing, administering, site building, and/or maintaining the content of a Drupal-based website. The guide is also aimed at people who already have some experience with a current or past version of Drupal, and want to expand the range of their skills and knowledge or update them to the current version. The guide is kept up-to-date with the current major version of the core software.
- Acquia Certified Drupal Site Builder Exam course from the folks at drupalize.me - The Acquia Certified Drupal 10 Site Builder exam and the Acquia Certified Drupal 9 Site Builder exam are part of Acquia's Drupal certification program. The exams consist of 50 scenario-based questions that show your knowledge of site building topics including content and user management, content modeling, site display, community and contributed projects, module and theme management, and general site security and performance. We've gathered together a concise list of the Drupalize.Me tutorials, and other resources, that will help you prepare for both the Acquia's Certified Drupal 9 and 10 Site Builder exams. (Note some parts are behind a paywall.)
- Drupal Site Builder Certification Learning Plan from Acquia Academy - This learning plan provides those new to Drupal with the basic training and resources to prepare for the Acquia Certified Drupal Site Builder Certification Exam. It contains: Approximately 6 hours of video instruction and accompanying resources, a certification exam study guide, practice text questions and a link to register for the exam. Acquia provides free Drupal training, practice certification exams, and other valuable resources.
- Debug Academy offers a variety of paid courses to learn Drupal usage and development. Check out their free Drupal Course Training Preview.
Books
There are many books about Drupal that are worth reading.
- Daniel Sipos's Drupal 10 Module Development: Develop and deliver engaging and intuitive enterprise-level apps, 4th Edition published April 2023
- Adam Bergstein's Drupal 10 Masterclass: Build responsive Drupal applications to deliver custom and extensible digital experiences to users published Jan 2024
- Matt Glaman and Kevin Quillen's Drupal 10 Development Cookbook. Published in Feb 2023
- Luca Lussos's Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development: Build fast, responsive Drupal websites with custom theme design to deliver a rich user experience published August 2023. For an interview with the author about this book check out this episode of Talking Drupal
- Learning Drupal 9 as a framework by Stef Van Looveren. Full code included. The code in the repo was updated to Drupal 10 in Feb 2024. This is also available in pdf or epub format on leanpub
- 31 days of Drupal migrations by Mauricio Dinarte updated October 2020
- Fran Gil's Expert in Drupal 9 Front-End Development. Updated in Sep 2022
- Fran Gil's Expert in Drupal 9 Back-End Development. Updated in Sep 2022
- Decoupled Drupal in Practice by Preston So Jan 2019
- Drupal 8 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Drupal 8 updated for 2019
- Drupal 8 module development. Learn how to write Drupal 8 modules by Lakshmi Narasimhan - last updated in 2017
- Check out some older Drupal books from Packt publishing
- Drupal Book.org is an online only book by Ivan. Updated Sep 2018. While it is not complete, it is a nicely formatted valuable resource
- Drupal 8 Theming with Twig by Chaz Chumley Published in March 2016
Please note
Some of these are affiliate links so Amazon may send me some money if you purchase items using these links.
Learning PHP
- PHP: The Right Way is a great resource for learning PHP. It is a living document that is updated regularly.
- Gary Clarke's Learn Object Oriented PHP 3 hour programming course for Symfony, Laravel, and Drupal is a great series of videos that will help you understand the basics of Object Oriented PHP. This is a great foundation for understanding Drupal development.
Free Drupal video training
- Check out some nice short form videos on how to use various modules, create modules, and even using Single Directory Components by Saranya Ashokkumar
- Gary Clarke's Learn Object Oriented PHP 3 hour programming course for Symfony, Laravel, and Drupal is a great series of videos that will help you understand the basics of Object Oriented PHP. This is a great foundation for understanding Drupal development.
- Webwash Expert Drupal Training - Webwash offers a variety of free video courses on Drupal 8 and 9.
Paid Drupal video training courses
These are paid training courses that are very detailed and informative. They are kept up to date by excellent instructors and worth the expense.
- Mastering Drupal: Content Managers Edition on Udemy by Bevin Wishart
- drupalize.me is an amazing training facility spun off from Lullabot which provides on-demand training and articles on all things Drupal. This is definitely worth a subscription if you want to fully grasp Drupal development or bring new people up to speed.
- Symfonycasts is another incredibly good service that teaches all about the nuts and bolts of Symfony, PHPUnit and many other tools. I think the Drupal course they have might be a little dated now.
- Learning drupal 9 as a framework by Stef Van Looveren
- Drupal developer Essentials by Stef Van Looveren: Configuration management, Composer, Drush commands and Debugging in Drupal 8, 9 & 10 explained
- Learn Object Oriented PHP by Gary Clarke
- OSTraining is another excellent source of training for Drupal and many other web technologies.
Instructor led Drupal Training
- Mike Anello of Drupal Easy has excellent instructor led developer training courses. These include: Drupal Career Online and Professional Module Development. Mike also offers project coaching and consulting.
- Debug Academy offers a variety of courses including Acquia certification prep, Drupal 10 module development, and Drupal 8/9/10 theme development. Check out their free Drupal Course Training Preview.
Drupal Certification Preparation
- Acquia certification study guides - Acquia provides free study guides for their certification exams. These are a great resource for preparing for the exams.
- WidgetsBurritos D8 Study Guide. Although this is not up to date with Drupal 10, it is a valuable resource and may be useful while preparing for the exam.
- Drupalize.me Acquia Certification Exam Prep.
Artificial Intelligence
- The Drupal Droid is a chatbot that can help you with Drupal questions. It is powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT and requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus. Check out a 5 minute video here.
Drupal news
Social Media
- Drupal Slack server - There are dozens of very active channels. Historically, this communication all used to happen on IRC.
- Mastodon is starting to show signs of Drupal life with a Mastodon instance focused on Drupal.
- Twitter is a complete cesspool of misinformation, but still has many useful Drupal posts from various sources.
Newsletters
- Drupal Association newsletter
- Drupal.org Newsletters - Weekly Drupal newsletter, Monthly Drupal Association Newsletter, Educational Opportunities & occasional ad hoc emails.
- The Weekly Drop, a Drupal newsletter The Drupal Association has partnered with The Weekly Drop to bring up-to-date News and Events to the Drupal community.
- The Drop Times Editor's pick - A weekly guide to the best Drupal news and articles from our editors.
- Talking Drupal Newsletter - A weekly newsletter about Drupal and Open Source from the team at Talking Drupal.
Blogs and articles
- Planet drupal
- TheDropTimes is a news website started with the vision of contributing to the growth of a vibrant community of users and contributors around Drupal through the process of covering and promoting everything happening around Drupal.
- DrupalSun Feed: Drupal related articles from all over the web.
- The weekly Drop archives
- Drupal association previous newsletters
- Drupal Official Blog - News and stories to help you make something amazing, for anyone, with Drupal.
- Phil Norton of #!code writes some amazing articles and has useful code snippets.
- Martin Anderson-Clutz's sandbox for a wide variety of fantastic Drupal, Acquia and module information at. He is also the author and maintainer of the Smart Date Module and about 8 bazillion other modules.
- Matt Glaman posts regularly about so many aspects of Drupal and is the author of excellent Drupal books.
- Salsa Digital Agency has some good articles that are definitely worth keeping up with.
- Dries Buytaert's blog - Dries is the founder and project lead of Drupal and the CTO of Acquia.
- Tag1 consulting blog is another fantastic source of interesting and informative articles about Drupal.
- Short but sweet Drupal articles by Oliver Davies - Oliver is a Drupal developer and Linux system administrator.
- Markie blog - Short and interesting articles and utility scripts including reports on his core work. Mark Conroy is a Drupal developer and consultant.
Podcasts and Vlogs
- Talking Drupal is a long standing weekly conversation about and around Drupal development. It was started by Stephen Cross, John Picozzi, and Nic Lafin in 2013 and is still going strong. This author was interviewed on Episode #398
- Lullabot Podcast: News, interviews, and tips about Drupal and Open Source from the team at Lullabot
- Mike Anello's Drupal Easy podcast
- The Beyond Blocks Podcast by Oliver Davies - A weekly podcast about Drupal, open-source, and related software development topics.
- Tag1 Team Talks - Tag1 Consulting's vlog and podcast about Drupal and web development.
- Drupal Pupils youtube channel - Highlighting individuals in the Drupal community and sharing knowledge for the betterment of the community. More on LinkedIn
Getting Help
- Drupal Slack server - There are dozens of very active channels. Historically, this communication all used to happen on IRC.
- Drupal Stack Exchange - A question and answer site for Drupal developers and administrators.
- Drupal.org Forums - The official Drupal forums.
Drupal API Reference Materials on drupal.org
- Top level api.drupalorg: Essential background concepts, OOP conventions etc. at the Drupal API Reference on drupal.org
- Drupal APIs
- Change records for Drupal core
Essential background concepts
Here are some high level overviews of Drupal concepts:
- Object-oriented conventions used in Drupal
- Extending and altering Drupal
- Security and best practices
- Types of information in Drupal
High level User Interface concepts
Storing and retrieving data
Other Essential APIs
- Plugin API
- Services and the Dependency Injection Container
- Events
- Internationalization
- Cache API
- Utility classes and functions
- User accounts, permissions, and roles
- Render API
- Theme system
- Update API
- Migration
Additional topics
- Batch API
- Queue API
- Typed Data
- Automated tests - PHPUnit and Nightwatch
- Integrating third-party applications
Resources
- Drupal Training - organizations that indicate they provide Drupal training services.