Drupal development with the Eclipse IDE (3.7.x)

Sonstiges | english | Alle | 45 Minuten | Lowell Montgomery

As you probably know, Eclipse is a leading open-source IDE which supports a broad range of coding languages and, like Drupal, is highly extensible.

A lot has been written about how to configure Eclipse for Drupal development. Unfortunately, if you search, you may find it hard to sort out information which applies to the latest version of Eclipse, to Drupal-specific settings, and to extending Eclipse with the most useful plugins. And if you already use Eclipse, unless you regularly do such a search, you may not be aware of what is new and useful since you started. I am not an expert (neither in Eclipse nor in Drupal development), but I'm digging into the task of sorting out all the best tips I can find. While my presentation will cover information that people just starting to use the IDE will find necessary (e.g. configuration for Drupal coding standards, including some things I have not seen documented elsewhere), I intend to also get into some “cool stuff” that experienced Eclipse users may not be aware of. My presentation will be a broadly expanded version of presentation I gave at yesterday’s Frankfurt / Rhein-Main area Drupal Meetup (9 February 2012).

Topics covered will include:

• Configuration for Drupal coding standards
• Adding the Drupal Eclipse project hook templates
• Creating your own templates and snippets
• Extending Eclipse with eGit for better integration with Git, the version control system used on Drupal.org. I understand eGit was pretty rough in past, but it’s a pretty powerful tool now.
• Subversion (SVN) support in Eclipse for those who work with companies which use it instead of Git
• Helpful keyboard shortcuts and power tips (participants especially welcome to share their favorite tips).
• Other useful Eclipse plugins which can be helpful.

In addition to my presentation, I'd like to reserve some time at the end for discussion so that tips can be shared if participants have additonal ideas which can improve the Drupal coding workflow in Eclipse. We can also discuss the pros and cons of other development tools (other IDEs and text editors) which can be potential alternatives or supporting tools.

We'll move at a fast pace due to the restricted time available, but I will provide my slides and also plan to produce a blog post based on this presentation so that more up-to-date information is readily available. So you should be able to follow up on this session with good, current info in a readable format.

Slides have been uploaded

The whole presentation has been reworked to better work as a PDF (some of my “slides” were video clips, but are now still images). I’ve done my best to add appropriate additional notes, which in the PDF version, are not large enough to be read from the back of a room when projected, but should provide something like the point I was trying to make with some slides. I have also written a blog post of the same content, with further “episodes” to come. You can see that on http://drupal.cocomore.com/blog/using-eclipse-pdt-drupal-development

eclipse_drupal-drupalcamp_essen-pdf-slides.pdf