The Road from Newbie to Ninja: Drupal Tools and Techniques

SESSION OVERVIEW
One of the keys to being a productive Drupal developer is getting your development environment set up correctly. Having the right tools available (and knowing how to use them) can save you many hours of frustrating development time, and even turn that time into playful, creative coding instead of rage against the machine.

AGENDA
Drupal Project module co-maintainer Chad Phillips will share tips on how to get started developing for Drupal, and how to get the most out of your developer efforts. The presentation will be geared towards those just starting out with Drupal development, and/or code development altogether.

Topics that will be addressed include:

• Setting up a working LAMP/WAMP/MAMP stack (what Drupal runs on) the easy way.
• Editing environments, including basic text editors and advanced IDE’s.
• Coding standards
• Resources to turn to when you get stuck.
• Helper modules.
• All kinds of other time-saving and sanity-saving tips!

GOALS
Beginners should emerge from this session with enough information to start coding for Drupal The Right Way (TM), and it should be fun!