5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal 7 Ninja

Call yourself a Drupal Ninja!

Packed with 5 powerful secrets, this eBook will provide the foundation to improve all aspects of your Drupal website development skills.

Are you a Drupal designer, developer, site builder, project manager, or hobbyist? The 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal Ninja can help you improve your Drupal skills.

Do you feel like you know the basics of Drupal but are struggling with managing multiple projects or even a specific large Drupal project? Do you struggle with ways to take your Drupal website development to the next level? Do you think there is a better way to build, manage, and deploy Drupal websites, but don't know what that way is? If any of these ring true, you have come to the right place. The 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal 7 Ninja will:

• Improve your Drupal site building techniques
• Help you build a streamlined Drupal development process
• Provide you with more peace of mind when managing multiple Drupal projects or large Drupal projects
• Improve your Drupal site building and development efficiency
• Show you how to look at a Drupal website differently than you have in the past

The eBook goes over code editors, Drush, Git, development processes, Drupal hosting, the Features module, and much more. You will not only learn to become a better Drupal developer, you will learn development concepts and techniques that are applicable outside of Drupal as well.

This book contains:

• 200 action packed pages
• 5 Drupal development secrets
• 25 Drupal ninja lessons
• The blueprint to become a Drupal Ninja

About Code Karate and the author

If you are new around here, you can see that Code Karate has posted a lot of videos and blog posts on Drupal over the years. In fact, there are more than 150 free Drupal videos, and nearly 100 blog posts on Drupal and website development topics. To date, Code Karate videos have been viewed more than 600,000 times, with more than 2.5 million minutes of Code Karate videos watched.

Code Karate was created in 2011 by me, Shane Thomas because I originally just wanted a place to record my journey with Drupal. I quickly realized that this was helping a lot of other Drupal developers, designers, and site builders to learn and better utilize Drupal in their website projects. I have worked on Drupal websites of all sizes, from small mom and pop business websites to large 6 figure Drupal projects. I have worked on my own and on Drupal development teams. I know that the Drupal learning curve is a difficult hill to climb, and this is the eBook I wish I would have read back in 2011 when I was first starting to publish my thoughts and findings on codekarate.com.

What people are saying?

Still not convinced?

Do you need some more convincing? Would it help to see a little more of the 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal 7 Ninja Ebook? If so, keep reading as I will let you in on some secrets.

Drupal Ebook Table of Contents

Here is a sneak peak at the table of contents of the 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal 7 Ninja. This will give you an idea of the topics that are covered in the Ebook.

• Let’s get this party started
  • Why write an ebook and What to Expect?
  • Who is this for?
  • What is a Drupal Ninja?
• Secret 1: Code Editing... What you see is not what you get
  • Komodo Edit Features I could not live without
  • What are some other Code Editors to look into?
  • Why You Shouldn’t Dismiss this Secret
• Secret 2: Drush... Command line Kung Fu
  • Getting Started By Installing Drush
  • Downloading Drupal with Drush
  • Downloading and installing New Drupal Modules
  • Disabling a Drupal Module/Theme
  • Listing Drupal Modules and Themes using Drush
  • Uninstalling a Drupal Module
  • Running Cron on your Drupal website
  • Clearing your Drupal cache
  • Backing up your Drupal website
  • Restoring your Drupal website from a backup
  • Updating Drupal Core and Contributed Modules/Themes
  • Countless Other Awesome Features
  • Why You Shouldn’t Dismiss this Secret
• Secret 3: Version Control (with Git)... Never lose your code or your mind again
  • Choosing the Right Service to Host Your Git Repository
  • Getting Started with Git
  • Git Configuration
  • Creating Your First Git Repository
  • Viewing Your Project Status
  • Adding Files to your Repository
  • Committing Your Changes
  • Viewing Your Commit History
  • Viewing What Has Changed
  • Undoing Changes
  • An Introduction to Git Branches
  • Creating a Git Branch
  • Checking out your Git Branch
  • Making changes on your new branch
  • Merging a Git Branch
  • Fixing a Conflict
  • Pushing your Repository to Github
  • Learning about Git remotes
  • Pushing your Repository to Bitbucket
  • Cloning an Existing Git Repository
  • The .gitignore file
  • Bringing It All Together... With Drupal
  • Why You Shouldn’t Dismiss this Secret
• Secret 4: Development Process and Hosting... Don’t you dare touch production
  • Why you should define your development process
  • What does a typical development process look like
  • Define your release process
  • Choosing how to host your Drupal website
  • Why You Shouldn’t Dismiss this Secret
• Secret 5: Features Module... Get your site configuration in order
  • What is a Drupal Features Module
  • How Features fits into your development process
  • Getting Started with Features
  • Creating Your First Drupal Features Module
  • Making Changes to your Drupal Feature Module
  • Using Features to Migrate Changes between Drupal Websites
  • What the Features Module is actually doing and how it works
  • Why You Shouldn’t Dismiss this Secret
• Wrap Up
  • The 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal 7 Ninja
  • In Closing

A sneak peak at the 5 Secrets

The table of contents gives you a look at the concepts covered, however it might also e helpful to see an overview of each of the 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal Ninja.

Secret 1: Finding a Drupal Code Editor or IDE

A developer, designer, or site builder is nothing without a Code Editor or IDE. No matter what you are working on in the Drupal development process there will come a time when you need to open up a file. This might be a PHP file, a CSS file, an HTML file or any type of file that contains code for your Drupal website. If you are going to do this, it's important to have the tools and the skills with those tools to quickly and easily make the changes you need.

In this secret, you will learn about available options for Code Editors and IDE's and what you should be looking for when evaluating those options. Even if you are happy with the code editor you are currently using, this secret will force you to challenge your assumptions and at least evaluate some of the other available options.

Secret 2: Using Drush on your Drupal site

Drush in itself is not really a secret. Many Drupal developers know about it, but unfortunately many Drupal developers, designers, and site builders do not use it, or are not using it to it's full potential.

In this secret you will get an introduction to using Drush on a Drupal site. You will be able to follow along with various Drush commands to see how they are used and how you can add the Drush commands to your arsenal of tools when building and maintaining a Drupal 7 website.

Secret 3: Learn how to use Git with Drupal

Git is a powerful and flexible version control system. Using Git with Drupal can be a little overwhelming when first getting started. This introduction to Git will get you off on the right foot by first introducing core Git concepts such as cloning, commits, the Git staging area, undoing changes, and more. It then slowly works in more advanced concepts such as branching and Git remotes. This introduction to Git is not specific to Drupal and provides a good base level knowledge of how Git can be used on any project.

Once you have a good foundation of Git knowledge, the 5 Secrets to Becoming a Drupal Ninja introduces how Git can be used in conjunction with Drupal. Learn some of the techniques that professional Drupal developers use to keep track of the code changes on their Drupal websites.

Secret 4: Evaluating Drupal Hosting Providers and Defining a Drupal Development Process

This may be one of the most important secrets of all. All live Drupal sites use a hosting provider of some kind, but very few think of how to craft their Drupal development process and integrate that process into the hosting of their Drupal site.

In this secret, you will learn about and evaluate various Drupal hosting options so you can make an informed decision about where to host your Drupal website based on things such as reliability, development process, and budget. You will also focus extensively on how to craft your own personal Drupal development process based on best practices and how this process fits in with your hosting provider. Your Drupal development process is something that will help you build Drupal websites faster and more efficiently, while also giving you peace of mind knowing you are prepared if something goes wrong. Don't skip this one!

Secret 5: Managing Drupal Site Configuration with the Features Module

Drupal stores almost everything inside the Drupal database. This means that a lot of your settings are not in your code, but are stuck in your database. This is a problem especially when you want to use Git or create your Drupal development process. Luckily, the Drupal Features module allows you to export a lot of this common Drupal website configuration and settings into code. This code can be added to your Git repository and pushed up throughout your Drupal development process.

In this secret, you will learn what the Drupal Features module is, and how you can use it to get your Drupal site configuration into code and into your Git repo. You will be able to follow step by step examples that walk through the basics of the Features module and eventually learn more advanced concepts such as mapping these features modules into your Drupal development process.

Ready to level up your Drupal Site Building and Development Skills?

Hopefully now you can see that these secrets can help you become a better Drupal developer and build Drupal sites more efficiently than ever before.