Complete Drupal 11 Development Course – For beginners 2026

Introduction

In this lecture, we'll set up DDEV, a powerful local development environment that simplifies Drupal development using Docker. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a fully functional local development setup ready for Drupal projects.

What is DDEV?

DDEV is an open-source local development tool that uses Docker containers to create consistent development environments.

Benefits of DDEV:

* Easy Drupal setup

* Consistent environments across teams

* Built-in support for Composer

* Supports multiple PHP versions

* Simplifies database management

* Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

In this lecture we:

• Installed Drupal 11 using Composer

• Configured DDEV

• Created a local database

• Completed Drupal installation

• Verified the site is running

In this lecture, students will understand the complete Drupal 11 project structure, learn which folders are safe to modify, and discover where custom themes and modules should be created.

Introduction

Now that Drupal 11 is installed successfully, it's important to understand how Drupal organizes its files and directories.

Many beginners feel overwhelmed when they first open a Drupal project because there are dozens of folders and files. The good news is that you don't need to understand everything immediately.

In this lecture, we'll focus on the folders that Drupal developers use every day.

Topics covered

• Understanding importance of taxonomy/category

• How to manage taxonomy

• What is content types and its importance

• Create a new content type

Topics covered

• Leaning more about blocks and views

• Understanding menu and its importance

• Managing menu contents

Topics covered

• Learning more about appearance tab

• Understanding how themes are activated and installed

Topics covered

• Understanding the basic configurations available in Drupal website

Topics covered

• Understanding people tab with roles and permissions of users

Please practice on creating content types, add custom fields, build taxonomy categories, and populate the website with articles and images. This exercise will help you understand how Drupal structures content and prepares it for Views, theming, and custom development.

Topics covered

• Create a custom theme for the news website

• Adding info file

• Activating the theme

Topics covered

• Adding css and js assets in the theme

Topics covered

• Adding regions in the theme itself

• Divding pages into separate  region

Topics covered

• Adding main menu in menu region

• Designing the menu

Topics covered

• Remove search bar from menu region

• Learning about region and block layout

• Learning about theme suggestions

Topics covered

• Adding Hero section fields in basic page content type

• Cleaning up views display and form

Topics covered

• Creating views block for hero section

• Adding fields in views

Topics covered

• Placing hero section in homepage

Topics covered

• Designing hero section

• Overriding views files and layout changes

Topics covered

• Creating article contents which will act as news

• Assigning correct news category

Topics covered

• creating views for latest blocks

• adding blocks to homepage

• Designing the latest news grid

Topics Covered

• What is Trending News?

• Planning the Trending News layout

• Theming and views block creation

Topics Covered

• Anatomy of a news article page

• Reviewing theme suggestions for article layouts

• Planning content hierarchy

Topics Covered

• What is a Taxonomy Page?

• How Drupal generates taxonomy pages automatically

• News website category pages

Topics Covered

• Footer layouts used by news websites

• Planning footer content structure

• Adding links to footer menu

• Custom blocks for footer and logo

• Fa Fa icons

In this lecture, we'll create our first custom Drupal module and build a custom Block Plugin that displays News Categories along with the number of articles associated with each category.

This block will be used on the homepage sidebar and footer, similar to professional news websites.