Drupal Interview Topics

Why Drupal ?

Allows us to manage content type, advance option with CCK (Content construction kit), theming, also we can set templates for each content type, URL settings having a module PathAuto, Taxonomy and Terms and advance level of search.

How Search is good than other CMS ?

Search allows indexing on content types, taxonomy terms, content meta data, grouping, overriding the search template.

Drupal integrates other search engines so if not found from site it suggests from search engine.

Types of Modules in Drupal

There are three type of modules :

Core : by default its available in modules folder
Contributed : contributed by developers and approved by Drupal Team
Custom : customized module for project based on requirements

Which modules you like to recommend to your juniors ?

I would like to recommend you to visit Drupal Modules.

What are hooks in Drupal ?

Hooks are events which allows module to interact with drupal core.

Hook function name should be something like this :
modulename_hook_function(parameters)

Drupal Database Structure

Drupal database is based on EAV (Entity Attribute Value)

Drupal database structure is available HERE.

How to handle migration or upgrades ?

Backup of database
Put website to maintenence mode
Download new version
Uncompress and run update.php file
test the whole site quickly
Takeout website from maintenence mode

Debugging in Drupal

We can use three predefined functions

dsm($variable); //drupal set message, indirectly call dpm()

dpm($variable); //drupal print message

debug($variable);

Theme versus Template

Theme handles appearence of website while Template renders the content