Around the middle of last year, as my fixed-term cotract was drawing to a close I felt like changing jobs. I’ve always had the good fortune of being able to find a new placement within a short time. This time around I discovered a number of changes in the job market one of which has to do with being a PHP and Drupal developer.

1. A Drupal developer isn’t a PHP developer.

Unfortunately, not all recruitment agency professionals fully grasp the relationship between Drupal and PHP as some of the automated job opportunity emails give away. There were a number of phone calls during which most of the conversation bothered on the difference between PHP and Drupal. PHP is like the English Language and Drupal is more like Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare. This analogy isn’t accurate but it’s only an analogy.

2. There are lots of Drupal jobs and lots of Drupal developers.

Whilst there is plenty of opportunities out there in the Drupal market, I came to realise that not all jobs are suitable for any developer. Conversely, not all developers are suitable for a given job.

There is a perceived boom in the market, so anyone who has a basic grasp of Drupal may walk into some contract positions. In such cases the acceptable daily rate isn’t an issue. So, the people in charge of hiring are in a dilemna - Developer A can do the same job but for half the rate Developer B is requesting. This is compounded by recruitment agencies wanting fair share of deals.

3. A PHP developer isn’t a Drupal developer.

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) or Content Management Framework, depending on who you’re speaking to. With a basic understanding of PHP, it’s quite possible to learn Drupal and use it effectively without a deep grasp of the language used in its programming.

It’s like some using a spreadsheet application for day-to-day tasks which may be sufficient. You can do calculations, sort results and even able to exchange data between two sheets. However, it takes a different dimension of understanding to perform advanced tasks and be seen as a power user.

Drupal is written in PHP and the forthcoming Drupal 8 has taken Drupal to another level of professionalism. Apart from following a modern Object Oriented Programming (OOP) approach on the backend, it takes advantage of new features of the language such as anonymous functions (closures), traits, short array syntax, function array dereferencing etc.

Even though being a PHP developer doesn’t necessarily translate to being a Drupal developer and vice versa, it’s becoming imperative for a Drupal developer to demonstrate a well-grounded knowledge of PHP.