In the first guide, Planning and Managing Drupal Projects, we walked through the process of planning a site, figuring out the user experience, and working with content architecture. In the second, Design and Prototyping in Drupal, we started looking at how to create solid, user-centered design that works for a Drupal site, and how to allow Drupal’s default behavior to guide your design decisions without defaulting to making a site look “Drupally.”

In this guide, Drupal Development Tricks for Designers, we start looking at just a little bit of real, honest-to-goodness, developer Ninja Magick. I’m going to share what I’ve learned over years of building Drupal sites about setting up a development environment, getting yourself ready to collaborate on code with others, and other ways to make site building easier so you can focus on design.

Take your Drupal skills even further with valuable tricks for making site building truly efficient. In this concise guide—the third in a series by award-winning designer Dani Nordin—you’ll learn how to set up your own development environment, quickly update your modules, and use version control to protect yourself from bonehead mistakes.

Handle repetitive tasks with ease, avoid hours of frustration, and devote more time to pushing the envelope of Drupal design—just by picking up the basics of a few developer tools. It’s much more than simple coding; it’s real, honest-to-goodness developer Ninja Magick.

• Learn basic commands and use them in Drupal on the command line
• Set up your local development environment, and learn ways to collaborate on code with others
• Download modules, themes, libraries, and more with Drush, the Drupal shell
• Use Git, the free version control system, and create a GitHub account
• Pack content types, views, and other functionality you use often into a custom module with Features