The Best Drupal Site Building Workflow

Today, we want to share with you one of the best tips we ever give to Drupal site builders – the Drupal Site Building Workflow. Here at OSTraining, some of our most popular courses have been the Drupal Beginner Courses. On YouTube, our Drupal 8 Beginner course has over 4 million views! We teach a lot of beginners in Drupal, so when Drupal 9 was released, we created a new course you can get at OSTraining.com. As a side note: this workflow is perfect for Drupal 10 as well!

Drupal Site Building Workflow

As I shared, one of the best tips we give people in our Drupal Explained Course is the Drupal Site Building Workflow. There are many different ways you can build a Drupal website, however, there is a best practice workflow when it comes to Drupal site building.

Content Types

The Drupal Site Building Workflow starts with Content Types. Content Types are everything in Drupal. It is imperative you get this component correct, otherwise you would be better suited using a different CMS.

Fields

Once you decide on all of the Content Types and the different types of content you have, you can then can add the Fields, Taxonomy, Media, and any Modules you might need to support those Content Types.

Path & Permissions

The next two steps on the Drupal 9 Site Building Workflow are interchangeable. We suggest doing Paths or using Path auto to create those patterns and then building out your Permissions and Workflows. While they are interchangeable, we do recommend doing Permissions everytime you build a Content Type instead of waiting until the end when it is harder to do. I have recommended this in other videos, but it is my opinion that every site should use Workflows.

Layout

The next step in the workflow is Layout. Now, you will notice that Theme is positioned at the bottom of the workflow, indicating it can be done at any point. This is true! With your Theme in Drupal you can add it at any point but the Layout step is generally a pretty good time to do it, or even before this. You do not need your Theme complete to do Drupal site building. So, if your Theme is not ready at this point, that is fine!

You can still move forward and add:

• your Layouts
• your Blocks
• your Layout Builder
• your Views

Add Content

You now have your site ready and it is now time to Add Content. You have likely been using something like Devel to generate fake content up until this point. Now it is time to replace that and actually build your real content in your website. This will include Menus and defining how you are going to do Site Management.

Conclusion

We have just walked though one of best tips we ever give to Drupal site builders – the Drupal 9 Site Building Workflow! You are going to see variations of different workflows all over the internet and from different people you talk to but this is the one we have found most supportive and the one that we promote here at OSTraining. We have found that it has helped many site builders and we hope that it has been helpful for you today!

To follow along be sure to watch our YouTube video below!