Are cheatsheets still a thing for Drupal developers?

Published August 30, 2022

Cheetsheets pixel art.Over the past couple of weeks, I've been looking for Drupal-related cheatsheets for developers. I went through my old notes, asked students and alumni of Drupal Career Online, and posed the question on both Twitter and LinkedIn. While I did receive some feedback, I'm starting to get the feeling that cheatsheets aren't really used all that often for neither new or experienced developers.  This is a bit of a shame, since they can be so useful. 

In the past, I would have defined a cheatsheet as something that one could print out on a single page of standard paper (and perhaps even laminate it!) Over the past couple of years, my personal definition of a cheatsheet has evolved into something like this: a short reference guide on a particular topic that only serves as a reminder of functionality, not an explainer. 

My own personal experience with cheatsheets over the past couple of years has mainly been limited to this Composer Cheat Sheet for Developers - a fast, interactive reference for all/most of the Composer functionality that I currently need. I also have the Twig Tweaks module cheatsheet handy - for the rare occurrences where I'm deep enough in front-end work where it is required. I suspect folks that do Drupal front-end development regularly will find it very useful. 

I was reminded of this excellent Drupal Entity API cheatsheet written by Keith Dechant: It was posted in November 2017 and as far as I can tell is still all (mostly?) relevant. For those of us who are back-end Drupal developers, it is definitely worth a look. Thanks to Martin Anderson-Clutz for the reminder!

The thing that actually started me thinking about cheatsheets was Drupal's Form API, and how there doesn't appear to be a single page reference on Drupal.org that shows all the various element types and available properties. To me, this seems like a great exercise for someone looking for a documentation credit. This article by the folks at Drupalize.me is the closest I could find. IMHO, a cheatsheet for Form API elements would be very useful. 

Another Drupal-adjacent cheatsheet that I would whole-heartedly welcome into my development process would be one for Flexbox. I'm quite confident that something like this exists out in the wilds of the internet that I'm just not aware of. In the meantime, this Complete Guide to Flexbox from CSS-Tricks has been my go-to, even if it doesn't fit my definition of a cheatsheet. 

Finally, Emmons Michael Patzer, in a comment on LinkedIn, pointed me in the direction of Cheatography - a bit of a repository of various web technology cheatsheets.

Are there any other useful, up-to-date Drupal-related cheatsheets out there? If so, I'd love to hear about them!

UPDATE - I just became aware of this nifty Drupal/Twig cheatsheet

The pixel art image used in this blog post was generated by the DALL-E project of OpenAI.

Comments

Great write-up, and thanks for the callout. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the Flexbox guide you included literally has a one-page poster you can download and print out. Sounds like a cheat sheet to me...

Submitted by Martin Anderso… (not verified) on Thu, 09/01/2022 - 07:43

Author comment

Ha! Well, that's embarrassing - I never noticed that. Although in my (not very impressive) defense, they call it a "poster", and not a "cheatsheet".

Michael, in my opinion, the best cheat sheet is the documentation.

Submitted by Dmitry (not verified) on Thu, 09/01/2022 - 10:27

I love cheat sheets for quick reference, updated documentation is best!

Submitted by Bob Sndograss (not verified) on Thu, 09/08/2022 - 10:34

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