What makes a Drupal expert? After recently passing a Drupal Test on Elance, and getting a score placing us in the Top 1% of all the developers on their site, I’ve been thinking. What does it mean to be a Drupal expert?
The Elance test was rather simple and I don’t think it truly tested whether we as a company are Drupal Experts or not. Their test was all about usability and had very little to do about custom Drupal programming.
Being an expert in Drupal takes time. It’s something that doesn’t come from reading a book alone. It comes from time spent learning about Drupal, and time spent using Drupal.
Some developers can be overwhelmed with Drupal, and don’t understand how to properly use Drupal. We’ve taken on several projects where the initial Drupal developer took on more then they could handle.
When looking for a Drupal Expert, I’d look for these skills:
- Experience with Drupal Module Development
- Someone with an understanding of how modules are created.
- Someone that understands how Drupal hooks work.
- Someone that understands how to version Drupal modules.
- Experience creating Custom Drupal Themes
- More than just modifying someone’s Drupal theme: Too many designers just buy a working theme, then hack at it until they get something to work. Only to find out they have no clue what the theme creators did or how to do it again.
- Someone that can create a Drupal Theme from scratch because they really do know how Drupal themes work.
- Performance
- Someone that knows how to create modules and themes that work with Drupal caching.
- Someone that knows how to scale a Drupal site, so that with increase visitors the site doesn’t take forever to serve pages.
- Understanding of which modules to use and when.
- There are a lot of open source Drupal modules out there some good, some bad
- An understanding of when to use an open source module, and when to make a custom module
We’ve been making Drupal websites for several years now. We’ve worked on projects both large and small. As Drupal experts we can save you time on your next Drupal development project. Whether it’s creating a custom theme, custom module, or tweaking an open source Drupal module that’s already out there, we can help.
