Ultimate Drupal Reference

When it comes to Drupal, there are a lot of videos, blog posts and general how-to's out there.
While some of them are good, others are in need of improvement and a few of them are simply outdated.

This project will try to list you the best, most promising and most efficient resources that you might need when developing a Drupal site.

Contribution guidelines

This project lives through new and up-to-date resources from the community, from you!
If you would like to add a resource or contribute in any other kind of way, be sure to read our contribution guidelines.

Table of contents

• Installing Drupal
  • Evaluate Drupal projects without installing Drupal
  • Drupal requirements
  • Official installation page
  • Drupal VMs
  • Composer
  • Drupal CLI's
  • IDE's
• Site building with Drupal
• Theming in Drupal
• Distributions
• Modules
  • Commerce
  • Content
  • Developer tools
  • Forms
  • Media
  • Migration
  • Multilingualism
  • Multisite
  • Performance
  • SEO / Analytics
  • Security
  • Site building
  • Site navigation
  • Social media
  • User & Roles management
  • Views
• Themes
  • Frontend themes
  • Admin themes
• Troubleshooting
  • Update to the latest stable release
  • Read the project's description
  • Issue queue
  • Drupal Answers
  • Google
  • IRC / Slack support
• Contributing to Drupal
• Video tutorials
  • Beginner training series
  • General
  • Modules
  • Theming
• Blog posts
• Further resources
• Drupal PaaS
• Get in touch with the Drupal community
• Credits
• License

Installing Drupal

There are different ways of installing Drupal. You can either install it directly on your local machine (or any server) or you can also work with a VM if you prefer.
If you really just want to catch a quick glimpse about a specific Drupal distribution, module or theme, then you don't even need to install anything! Check out the next section for details.

If you want to run Drupal locally (and directly) on your Mac machine, check out this great tutorial.

Evaluate Drupal projects without installing Drupal

No further information needed. Simply visit simplytest.me and launch your custom sandbox!

Drupal requirements

In order to be able to run Drupal on your machine (or any server), you need a web server with PHP and a SQL database server. Please check the official requirements page for more details.

Official installation page

Up-to-date and detailed instructions can be found on the official installation page.

Drupal VMs

If you prefer working with a VM, check out following alternatives:

• Docker
• Drupal VM

Composer

While not required, it's highly recommended that you set up your Drupal project with Composer, regardless of your technical setup.
Check the Composer template for Drupal projects to install Drupal quickly via Composer.

Composer prestissimo

If you want to speed up Composer, have a look at prestissimo.
You can install it globally (no project dependency) to speed up Composer installations by a lot!
Simply run composer global require hirak/prestissimo and you're good to go.
Read more about prestissimo in its project page.

Converting a non-Composer Drupal codebase to use Composer

Jeff Geerling wrote a nice blog post about convertig a non-Composer Drupal codebase to use Composer.
Check it out and benefit from Composer!

Drupal CLI's

When it comes to developing custom modules, themes or simply automate certain tasks with scripts/cronjobs, there are two major Drupal CLI's which can be a huge help for you:

• Drupal Console
• Drush

IDE's

There are lots of different IDE's and editors for PHP. But most Drupal developers tend to use PhpStorm.
Do you use any other IDE or editor? Please let me know!

Site building with Drupal

Once you have Drupal set up and running, it's time for site building.
Have a look at the great documentation on drupal.org about site building as well as as understanding the concepts of Drupal.

Theming in Drupal

• Twig Documentation - Twig is the templating language used in building a Drupal theme
• Debugging Twig Templates - This will allow you to see which templates are in use on a page, which template is used to render each item on the page, any hooks for that template, and give you suggestions for naming your new templates
• Drupal 8 Theming Fundamentals, Part 1 and Part 2 - An overview of creating and working in a Drupal 8 theme
• Drupal.org Theming Guide for Drupal 8 - The official guide to Drupal 8 theming. Not always the easiest to understand but very helpful for reference on many topics.

Distributions

While Drupal 8+ core comes with lots of functionality already, the strength of Drupal lies in its extensibility.
Distributions are full copies of Drupal that include Drupal Core, along with additional software such as themes, modules, libraries, and installation profiles.
They're handy if you really just want to have a quick start with Drupal.

• Druppio - A small business distribution with demo content.
• Lighting - Lightning is a solid Drupal starter kit that enables developers to create great authoring experiences and empower editorial teams.
• Open Social - Open Social is a out of the box solution for online communities.
• Thunder - Thunder is a Drupal 8 distribution for professional publishing.
• Varbase - Varbase is an enhanced Drupal distribution packed with adaptive functionalities and essential modules, that speed up your development, and provides you with standardized configurations.
• .. and many more on drupal.org

Modules

Commerce

• Drupal Commerce - Drupal Commerce is used to build eCommerce websites and applications of all sizes.
  • Also make sure to check out the commerce documentation.
• Commerce Registration - Provides Drupal Commerce with the ability to sell registrations via the Entity Registration module.

Content

• Address - Provides functionality for storing, validating and displaying international postal addresses.
• Automatic Entity Label - Automatic Entity Label is a small and efficient module that allows hiding of entity label fields. To prevent empty labels it can be configured to generate the label automatically by a given pattern.
• COOKiES Consent Management - User consent management module for Drupal.
• Corresponding Entity References - CER keeps reference fields in sync. If you have two entities that refer to each other using Entity Reference (or some other kind of reference field), it saves you the trouble of double-editing your enti