When you’re looking for a Drupal Commerce developer, what exactly are you looking for? A lot hangs on this question. We’ve encountered some, let us say, “creative” implementations that painted the business into a corner or wasted a lot of time and money.
E-commerce websites are often mission-critical, and Drupal Commerce reliably powers $100s of millions in revenue per year, but an inexperienced developer can inadvertently introduce unnecessary risk. A mission-critical website needs experienced hands. Someone who can navigate the intersection of technical architecture and business logic that defines successful ecommerce implementations.
So what makes a good Drupal Commerce developer? What should you look for and what should you expect?
Drupal Mastery
At its core, Drupal Commerce is simply an arrangement of Drupal's core building blocks—entities, fields, configuration objects, views, and forms. But "simply" doesn't mean "easy." A developer needs intermediate to advanced PHP skills and must understand Drupal's architectural patterns deeply enough to know which tool fits which job. They also need to be familiar with Drupal.org and the ecosystem of contributed modules so they don’t go off half-cocked and decide to reinvent the wheel.
Why is this important? When a developer reads about creating a custom price calculation, they will learn about the system of price resolvers, which are services sorted by weight. A qualified developer immediately understands what a service is, how to define one, and how Drupal's dependency injection system will execute their code at the right moment. Without this foundational knowledge, they'll be copying and pasting code without understanding the underlying architecture. When bugs appear, they won’t know where to look to solve them.
The developer should also master essential development disciplines:
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