One of the other extremes, is a business may assume that a Drupal person should do all three specialities. To deliver a particular piece of functionality or feature, the work may have to go through each of the specialities before it is done. In one extreme, a business may hire specialists. How a business hire and use Drupal people varies. Both backend developers and fronted developers will do elements of site building. In most of the projects I have worked on, there has not been a dedicated site builder. You may be more advanced in one area or another, but still act in a general capacity. It is common for module developers to share and collaborate on contributed modules, themers on contributed themes and site builders on site building recipes and other forms of documentation. Site Builders, Module Developers and Themers will often contribute their work back to the community and collaborate with others. A note on contributing and collaborationĭrupal is inherently a collaborative project. Often they will set up automated deployment. They may also get involved in some of the more advanced side of the theme layer as well. They may also be know as “backend Drupal developers”. They write custom modules, automated tests, consume web services, automate deployment etc. Drupal Module Developer / Backend developerĪ Drupal developer is someone who writes a lot of PHP and other server side languages. Ideally they will be well versed in implementing responsive design. They should be able to take a design and turn it into the working theme.

They are also experts in the Drupal theme layer. They are experts in HTML, CSS and Javascript. Drupal Themer / Frontend developerĪ Drupal Themer is the specialist front end developer. And mastering this is a very valuable skill in itself. The Drupal community and the platform provides a very powerful tool set for people to build innovative and complex sites without the requirement to be a programmer. One of the magnificent things about Drupal is that it does not exclude non-developers. Site Builders will build the content types, taxonomy, navigation, image presets, rules etc. They will understand the limitations of modules and should be able to provide a concise argument of the pros and cons of various solutions. Site Builders will have experience with a wide range of contributed modules and will understand how they work together to solve a particular problem. But most of the functionality of the site/application comes from configuring Drupal core and contributed modules. I say much, because they might implement the odd hook here and there. Drupal Site BuilderĪ Drupal site builder is someone who builds Drupal sites with point and click in the admin UI without writing much or any custom code. The skills required for each are quite different. In effect, there are three main areas of expertise in the Drupal world: site building, backend/module development and theming. This is especially true with some recruiters and even managers and clients that are hiring. There always has been some confusion around job titles and skills in the Drupal world. But what exactly is a Drupal Developer? A Drupal Developer is someone who knows Drupal right? Right?! As the Drupal market continues to rock and roll, more and more clients need “Drupal Developers”.

Drupal developer course