Drupal Interview Preparation Guide
Strengthen your Drupal interview skills with our collection of 40 important questions. Our questions cover a wide range of topics in Drupal to ensure youre well-prepared. Whether youre new to the field or have years of experience, these questions are designed to help you succeed. Secure the free PDF to access all 40 questions and guarantee your preparation for your Drupal interview. This guide is crucial for enhancing your readiness and self-assurance.40 Drupal Questions and Answers:
1 :: What Is Drupal?
Drupal (pronounced Dru-Pull) is an open source content management system offering a toolset that rivals those of most commercial alternatives. With integrated social media and e-commerce functionality, it provides unique value as part of your social media strategy.
2 :: What Does Drupal Do?
Drupal is the choice for many great web sites because it does a lot of different things very well, and allows different kinds of information to interact effectively through its flexible, open architecture. Compared with commercial or custom solutions, Drupal's feature set is far more economic and practical for most organizations.
3 :: How Does Drupal Scale?
Trellon has built Drupal sites and deployed them in very demanding scenarios, serving millions of page views a day. Drupal scalability and performance optimization is one of our core competencies, and we often work with existing web properties to find ways to improve their performance. Contact us to discuss your specific needs.
4 :: What Kind of Support Is Available?
A wide range of support services are available for organizations running Drupal sites. The Drupal community itself is an excellent resource for people looking to learn more about the platform or resolve specific issues that emerge using the system. Acquia offers an enterprise distribution of Drupal that includes uptime monitoring, email and telephone based troubleshooting support, and subscription plans for sites with varying performance requirements.
For hosting, Our works with a variety of partners to deliver solutions to ensure sites are operational and can scale to meet changing traffic expectations. Rackspace is Our preferred hosting partner, and their 100% uptime guarantee allows us to focus on building great web sites without worrying about the network. Workhabit and Amazon S3 offer cloud hosting solutions that allow us to build sites that automatically scale to handle large peaks of traffic, and to provision new servers dynamically based on actual traffic conditions on any given day.
For hosting, Our works with a variety of partners to deliver solutions to ensure sites are operational and can scale to meet changing traffic expectations. Rackspace is Our preferred hosting partner, and their 100% uptime guarantee allows us to focus on building great web sites without worrying about the network. Workhabit and Amazon S3 offer cloud hosting solutions that allow us to build sites that automatically scale to handle large peaks of traffic, and to provision new servers dynamically based on actual traffic conditions on any given day.
5 :: How Does Drupal Compare to Commercial CMS Systems?
Drupal is often compared to a number of commercial content management systems including Crown Peak, Expression Engine, Clickability and Site Life in terms of capabilities. None of these systems offer the range of features that can be found in Drupal or the flexible, developer-friendly architecture that allows us to rapidly deploy dynamic web sites. In terms of sustainability, these platforms charactertistically lack the innovative approach to development embraced by the Drupal community, with updates and new features continually being added to the platform. These systems typically do surpass Drupal in terms of out-of-the-box reporting and metrics tools, generally providing views of data that is also stored in other systems. For instance, detailed page tracking information can just as easily be pulled from a CDN and integrated into a Drupal site for much less than the costs of per-seat licenses from a commercial vendor over a 1 month period.
6 :: How Does Drupal Compare to Other Open Source CMS Systems?
Drupal is also often compared with other open source content management systems including Joomla, Plone, Scoop, Silverstripe, Typo3, Graffitti, Moveable Type and Wordpress. There are characteristic features to all of these systems that make them appropriate in certain contexts, and most of them compare favorably to Drupal in one category of operation or another. Few of them, however, are capable of offering the balance between performance and functionality found in Drupal.
7 :: How Does Drupal Compare to Ruby on Rails?
Another common alternative platform to Drupal is Ruby on Rails. We really don't have much to say about Ruby except that it is a framework moreso than a platform. There are some characteristically challenging web development tasks that are quite easy to do with Ruby, and there are others which are infinitely more complicated than they should be.
One big difference is the fact that Ruby lacks the refined data object model found in Drupal that ensures interoperability between various aspects of the system, such as adding new modules to modify the operations of others. Whereas Drupal offers a self-generating database schema for many modules and underlying components of the platform, Ruby on Rails emphasizes a design philosophy holding that simplification of code conventions leads to better outcomes. While this all sounds good in principle, we have found there are certain tasks that make adherance to this philosophy an ideal moreso than a practical goal and breaking free from these conventions when necessary a daunting task (especially when integrating with external systems).
One big difference is the fact that Ruby lacks the refined data object model found in Drupal that ensures interoperability between various aspects of the system, such as adding new modules to modify the operations of others. Whereas Drupal offers a self-generating database schema for many modules and underlying components of the platform, Ruby on Rails emphasizes a design philosophy holding that simplification of code conventions leads to better outcomes. While this all sounds good in principle, we have found there are certain tasks that make adherance to this philosophy an ideal moreso than a practical goal and breaking free from these conventions when necessary a daunting task (especially when integrating with external systems).
8 :: Why ca not A Drupal user edit a node they created?
Symptoms: An authorized Drupal user loses "edit" access to nodes they've created, even if they have appropriate node (or other module) access permissions. Or, user cannot edit a node that should be editable by them, based on access control or node access settings. No errors or warnings are presented to the user. Nothing in the Drupal watchdog log.
Possible Cause: The user does not have permission to use the input filter currently assigned to the node. (An administrator or other privileged user may have changed the input filter settings, or, input filter permissions may have been changed to exclude the node author since the node was created. As a result, the user never had, or no longer has permission to use the input filter associated with the node.)
Possible Cause: The user does not have permission to use the input filter currently assigned to the node. (An administrator or other privileged user may have changed the input filter settings, or, input filter permissions may have been changed to exclude the node author since the node was created. As a result, the user never had, or no longer has permission to use the input filter associated with the node.)
9 :: What are System requirements for Drupal?
A minimum base installation requires at least 3MB of disk space but you should assume that your actual disk space will be somewhat higher. For example, if you install many contributed modules and contributed themes, the actual disk space for your installation could easily be 40 MB or more (exclusive of database content, media, backups and other files).
10 :: Can you please explain the difference between Core and Contrib in Drupal?
The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS-feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.
As of August 2011 there are more than 11,000 free community-contributed addons, known as contrib modules, available to alter and extend Drupal's core capabilities and add new features or customize Drupal's behavior and appearance. Because of this plug-in extensibility and modular design, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework. Drupal is also described as a web application framework, as it meets the generally accepted feature requirements for such frameworks.
As of August 2011 there are more than 11,000 free community-contributed addons, known as contrib modules, available to alter and extend Drupal's core capabilities and add new features or customize Drupal's behavior and appearance. Because of this plug-in extensibility and modular design, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework. Drupal is also described as a web application framework, as it meets the generally accepted feature requirements for such frameworks.