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Drupal is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) with a large, supportive community. It’s used by millions of people and organizations around the globe to build and maintain their websites. You probably use Drupal every day without knowing it, as many top businesses and government organizations use Drupal, like the Government of Australia, Red Cross, Harvard, The Economist, BBC, NBC News, Whole Foods, Cisco, Twitter, and many, many more.

Drupal is open source software released under the GNU Public License. This means it has inherent benefits—cost, flexibility, freedom, security, and accountability—that are unmatched by proprietary software. For example, Drupal is free to download and anyone can modify and extend the platform. This ensures freedom from vendor “lock in” and it empowers users worldwide to monitor Drupal’s underlying code for compliance and security issues and fix them quickly.

Full of features and highly customizable

Drupal shines as a CMS. It provides a user interface that allows you to create and publish your content easily. The platform accommodates unlimited content types, including text and media content, with highly customizable forms. It dynamically retrieves, filters, and presents this content with powerful, yet simple-to-use tools. There are also intuitive content creation tools and powerful in-place editing tools. Drupal controls access to content and features with its sophisticated user role classification and permissions system.

All of the administrative and end-user-facing functionality in Drupal, from fundamental features, such as the ability to log in or create content to dynamic photo galleries and complex voting systems, comes from modules. What you download from Drupal.org is what is referred to as “Drupal core” and it comes packed with all of the most commonly used modules to build a site, but there is a huge variety of contributed modules, which thousands of developers make available for free on Drupal.org.

Drupal is also a powerful website development platform. Drupal adheres to modern object-oriented programming patterns, PHP best practices, HTML5 and YAML standards. It also incorporates other great web technologies, including CKEditor, Symfony2, Twig, jQuery, Backbone.js, and Guzzle. Extending functionality and gaining complete control over the design is accomplished through a robust assortment of add-ons in the form of modules and themes.

Learn Drupal

Drupal provides a lot of flexible tools for many different tasks, depending on your focus, from end users to developers. To learn more about the various building blocks and tools in Drupal, take a look at our guides.

Introduction to Drupal

If you are not already familiar with Drupal, you can learn more about basic concepts and terminology in this high-level introductory guide.

Introduction to Drupal

Guide

Categories

Basics, Site Building

Drupal 8, 9, and 10

Site builder

Site building is the Drupal role that everyone who wants to build a site should know, as it's the core Drupal competency for site creation. Site building involves getting Drupal up and running, and configuring the options to build a functional site.

Build Drupal Sites

Guide

Categories

Site Building, Site Administration

Drupal 8, 9, 10, and 11

Themer/Front-end Developer

A themer, also known as a front-end developer, is the connection between the designer and the developer on a project. They’re responsible for the architecture and implementation of the user-facing parts of a web site. This includes working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and related technologies. Drupal themers also use some PHP in template files, and in Drupal 8, they use Twig.

Frontend Theming

Guide

Categories

Theming

Drupal 8, 9, and 10

Developer

Developers, also known as engineers or programmers, use their knowledge of PHP, MySQL, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to extend, alter, and enhance Drupal by creating modules and integrating external services.

Develop Drupal Sites

Guide

Categories

Module Development, Backend and Infrastructure

Drupal 8, 9, 10, and 11

Community

In addition to being a great tool for building websites, one of the main strengths of Drupal is being one of the largest open-source communities, which creates the software, writes the documentation, provides support, and runs events all over the world. To tap into the true strength of Drupal and open source, the community is your best tool for making connections and accelerating learning.

The Drupal Community

Topic

Categories

Community

Drupal 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11

More information

Drupal has an amazing community of people who create the software and help each other make the best use of it. This is one of the main benefits of using Drupal — and everyone should take advantage of that.

Get started

Drupalize.Me provides the best Drupal training online, so you can learn anytime, anywhere. We are Drupal experts who have years of experience teaching others how to best use Drupal and the various related tools and technologies. Drupal is a big and exciting project to navigate, and we're here to help.

Become a Drupalize.Me member

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Level Up Front-End Development Skills with Drupalize.Me

Learning the ins and outs of template design and how to get data from the CMS into your components are integral to mastering Drupal website layout. Whether your goal is to theme your personal site, pass the Acquia front-end developer certification, or upgrade your skills for a job, our Drupal 8 theming tutorials will add a key skill to your toolbelt.

One month free code: campsite

Take your front-end development skills to the next level and learn Drupal 8 theming!

With our Drupal 8 Theming Guide, learn how to:

• Override and customize template files
• Implement layouts and regions
• Use Twig to create dynamic templates
• Add CSS and JavaScript libraries to your site
• Set up your site for theme development
• Create responsive image styles for optimized user experience

Select your plan and enter coupon code campsite at checkout.

One month free code: campsite

Testimonials from past workshops

Great balance between lecture, demos, and exercises. This is the best get-your-feet-wet-in-a-huge-subject workshop I've been to. It was a great transition from theming D7 to D8.

Julian Kittelson-Aldred

Very clear explanations of key concepts. Explaining how to track down which Twig file to modify for a particular part of the Drupal frontend.

Daniel Gillespie

I liked the instructions followed by hands-on coding. It made for a fun learning experience as well as reinforced my coder "winning" attitude. :)

Uzi Ashkenazi

Why Drupalize.Me?

Although Drupalize.Me is best known for our online video tutorials, and occasional public workshops, we have also been teaching private workshops for companies, universities, and organizations for years. Our team of experienced Drupal teachers are the best in the business and we've taught Drupal to thousands of aspiring Drupal site builders, administrators, themers, and developers. We've provided training to AAA, Turner Broadcasting, Red Hat, Best Buy, Stanford University, Penn State, Arizona State University, the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, and many, many more.

Custom training units can be created upon request. Please contact us if you would like more information about bringing Drupalize.Me's experts to you.

This workshop will familiarize front-end developers with Drupal's theme system through a combination of presentations, hands-on exercises, and group activities. Whether your goal is to theme your personal site, pass the Acquia front-end developer certification, or upgrade your skills for a job, our goal is to provide students with a solid foundation and enough knowledge to continue to practice and learn on their own.

You'll come away from this course knowing:

• How the Drupal theme layer relates to the rest of the system
• Common theming terminology and processes
• How to override any of Drupal's HTML output
• The relationship between base themes and sub-themes
• Everything you need to know about Twig when working with Drupal templates
• How to add both custom and third-party CSS and JavaScript libraries
• Tools for introspecting and debugging a theme
• Tips and tricks for using common front-end development tools like CSS preprocessors and task runners, in conjunction with Drupal

In addition to the real-time instructor-led workshop, attendees will also receive:

• Example code with extensive documentation suitable for use as reference material for future projects
• A PDF workbook with exercises, and solutions
• Access to pre-recorded explanations of the solutions for all exercises
• 1 month of free access to the entire Drupalize.Me tutorial catalog

Target audience:

• Individual developers who want to learn to customize existing themes, or create entirely new custom themes, for Drupal 9 and 10
• Teams of developers working together who have one or more themes that need to be upgraded for Drupal 9 and 10
• Anyone who needs a refresher on how Drupal themes work, or whose only experience so far is theming Drupal 7 sites

Assumptions:

Attendees should be familiar with HTML and CSS and understand how to administer content on a Drupal website. This workshop will be relevant for people who are new to Drupal theming as well as those looking to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10.

Details about what we'll cover

The workshop will be broken down into sections, and each section will consist of a combination of live presentation, hands-on exercises, and group practice activities.

Theming overview

In this section we’ll talk about the role that themes play in the creation of a Drupal site, get an overview of the types of things you can, and can not, do with a theme, go over the structure of a theme, and discuss theming specific concepts like regions, libraries, and inheritance.

Getting started with a new theme

In this section we’ll look at how Drupal uses *.info.yml files to collect metadata about available themes. Then, as an exercise we’ll create the foundation for a new custom theme, and discuss where the markup you see in a Drupal theme comes from. We’ll also walk through some things you can do when setting up your local environment in order to make theme development easier.

CSS & JavaScript libraries

There are a couple of different ways that you can add CSS and JavaScript to your theme, and we’ll walk through them while discussing the pros and cons of each. We’ll also look at how to use CSS preprocessors like Sass, and task runners like Grunt in conjunction with Drupal themes. Opening up the possibility to use a variety of existing front-end frameworks and libraries as part of your custom theme.

Overriding default markup

In this section we’ll examine Drupal’s use of Twig template files to generate HTML markup, and walk through the process of overriding that markup in our custom theme. We’ll look at how Drupal determines which template file to use, dynamic template file naming, and how to manipulate the HTML output in a template file.

Twig

Having a firm grasp of the Twig template language is essential. So we’ll spend some time going over the language’s syntax, look at how to print output, and use filters and functions to manipulate variables. Then we’ll walk through a couple of exercises that require using Twig to modify elements in our theme.

Preprocessing and more

In this section we’ll talk about using {theme-name}.theme files to add, and manipulate the variables available in a Twig template, and to conditionally add CSS and JavaScript libraries on only the pages where they are needed in order to increase page speed.