Drupal’s Steep Learning Curve

By Ben, on August 27th, 2009

While I don’t think I’ve mastered Drupal I’m past the worst of the learning curve, but there were a number of things that I never saw explained anywhere which caused me many a headache. Many a time I would update some css but after uploading and forcing a page refresh the changes wouldn’t appear and I’d spend the next 20-30 minutes trying to see if I’d mispelt something (which is often the case).

Occasionally it would happen that I didn’t make a mistake though leaving me extremely perplexed and thoroughly unconfident in my ability to learn the intricacies of Drupal, only to have my original changes suddenly appear on the site without me doing anything.

Something they don’t do a good job of explaining is that Drupal maintains caches (yes, more than one) and when changes are made you will need to clear them to allow Drupal to pick up your changes. Even more confusing is that up until recently it has never been made entirely clear where to go to clear the various caches as they are buried deep inside the administration interface – in Performance configuration of all places. That’s all changed now thanks to a contributed module called Administration Menu that presents the entire administration interface in a menu that appears at the top of the page, bringing cache flushing to the top level, which is a very nice change indeed.

One other very important thing that beginners who are trying to customise the look of their site need to know is that all of the built-in Drupal performance settings found at /admin/settings/performance/ should be disabled to stop Drupal from caching things like the css and javascript. This will avoid the problem I described above. Changes to your theme files will always require a cache flush however, especially any changes to template.php (the home of all the functions that do the cool stuff for your theme).

Of course I’m completely glossing over the fact that you also need to have an idea of how theming works in Drupal. Yet another mountain for the army of noobs to attempt the ascent of.