Site Building With Drupal and Why It’s Awesome
In the wonderful world of software development we have back end developers, front end developers, project managers, designers and a slew of other roles and titles that make it all possible and great! With Drupal came a new role…the site builder.
One of the most satisfying roles for me at Sego is that of a site builder. There is no better feeling than being able to implement a feature or build something from scratch without having to touch ANY code. This is of course the opinion of someone who is not a programmer by trade but I imagine this sense of satisfaction from creating something out of nothing is why most programmers do what they do….its an amazing feeling.
Up until my experience with Drupal I would consult with clients creating comps based off of their needs and then pass them along to our developers. The team would bring the product to life and turn these static comps into functioning pieces of software. It was satisfying to see the finished product but I always felt like I wanted to be more involved in the actual building of the software.
When we first started using Drupal I immediately began exploring all that could be done in the UI and quickly said “wow this is confusing”. As with most things Drupal it took practice, persistence, and a lot of help from the community but before I knew it I started understanding the lay of the land.
Shortly after that I began building out small pieces of projects with our devs. Setting up some content types, building out different menus, and little by little we started to realize that as a site builder I could reduce their workload and we could really push projects out quicker with this Drupal thing. I was building not just designing...without any code...awesome!
Many years later the power of site building is better than ever especially with some of the major upgrades with Drupal 8. This is one of the main reasons why we love building with Drupal. It allows for a synergy between site builders and developers that when done right can produce some power results in incredibly fast turnaround times. We have entire platforms that are fully extendable all though site building which allows for our devs to focus on more complicated issues while our site builders (me included) can extend these existing platforms.
If you are looking to get involved with technology and do not have a lot of, or any formal programming experience, I would highly recommend looking into Drupal site building. It’s open, has a great community, and when mastered will allow you to build some pretty amazing things all without ever having to touch a line code.
