Introduction

In our world of Drupal design and development, or any other package for that matter, it is seldom that we get things right the first time. In fact, most of our time is spent in isolating, patching, refining, and reevaluating code or design that we believed was perfectly fine. This has led to the creation of a plethora of developmental aids and tools to streamline these processes and save us a heap of time and effort better spent elsewhere. These include informational aids, browser-based tools, as well as Drupal modules which assist in development and debugging.

First and foremost is documentation. Drupal's documentation is largely centered around its handbook which can be accessed via http://drupal.org/handbook. Besides this, documentation for the various Drupal APIs provided is located at http://api.drupal.org.

Drupal-specific development and debugging tools primarily revolve around the Devel module and its offshoots, such as the Devel generate and Theme developer modules. We...