5 things you should not do on a Drupal site

Do not hack core

I think this advice is quite straightforward and spread within the Drupal community. But it cannot be stressed enough. Drupal provides a myriad of ways you can avoid the temptation of modifying core files. And even if a particular problem you have seems that it can be solved so easily by hacking core, don't. Employ proper techniques of overriding that particular functionality.

Why? Well, good luck updating Drupal later on if you modify core files. Either you will override your changes which will effectively break your functionality or you will have to keep making those changes every time you update. Drupal 7 is already past 20 versions, so think about it. A, and a kitten dies every time someone hacks core.

Do not make updates on production

Speaking of updating Drupal core (or even contrib), I think it's important to know you should never perform the updates straight on the production environment. You never know what can break as a result of the new functionality core or contrib brings to the table or removes from your site.

In other words, make sure you test everything locally or on a specific environment you have for this kind of purpose. It's not a big deal, you set it up once and then can reuse it for all your other sites or projects. This goes of course also for any kind of development work you do - never first on production.

And since we are on updates, make sure you read what the nature of the update is - even if it's security. It doesn't hurt to know what functionality will be affected. And this way, you learn maybe some new things about Drupal.

Do not install all the modules in the world

When I was a beginner I was amazed by the plethora of modules available to extend core. So I installed and installed because maybe the functionality will be needed later on site. Drupal can do so much. Little did I know that this would virtually halt my site to a standstill. And turns out, most of that functionality was never even needed.

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