Reverse engineering of Drupal based project

I am working on a drupal project which is half done and contains lots of bug.There are custom modules, form, ubercart integration and many more things. I got a sheet of bugs from him but there is not any knowledge transfer. So My question is that how can i know, what he(the person who worked previously on this project) did and in which module he made the changes. Are there any steps to follow in order to debug the things in drupal or there is any module i开发者_StackOverflow中文版n drupal which can help me and give relevant information of every page etc.What exactly you will do if you face this situation.

Please see.

I am new at drupal

Sweet mercy, you are in for a frustrating journey. I would start by watching tutorials on some of the big modules and learning how they work. You really just have to get a feel for Drupal to dissect anybody else's install.

I recommend by starting your research with by learning about CCK, Views, Ubercart and blocks. From there, you can really only hope to stumble through what he's done before you.

I wouldn't worry too much about modified core or contributed modules because you can easily check that by comparing the version you have with the files from drupal.org using a tool such as Beyond Compare.

On the other hand, if you're new to Drupal, it will be hard for you to figure out what he did because you don't know what a baseline Drupal site contains (so you won't know where the added value is or how to reproduce it, and more importantly, how to fix the bugs).

So I would strongly advise to hire someone with Drupal experience to figure out for you what he added, otherwise you'll spend some frustrating time figuring out the basics before you can dig into the interesting part.

Edit: Beyond Compare is also very useful for comparing SQL dumps from a clean installation (or gradually comparing what changes in the database as you enable/disable modules) and your website database.

if he's not talking to you, you're SOL. all you can do is try to figure it out file by file.

i would try:

• making a clean drupal installation
• copy the database over
• enable modules one by one

hopefully he didn't modify contributed or core modules (BAD!)
if his custom modules are separated out things should be easier

Start with the devel module, it's godly!

In addition to what the others said: Learn how hook_menu works. When a module implements hook_menu, it defines a url and tells Drupal which function should be called when that url is requested. If you know how to read a hook_menu implementation, it's easier to trace the origin of a page output.

Hopefully, all customization will be in the "sites" folder. I would start there, and have a look at the modules that are present, hopefully under sites/all/modules or sites/default/modules. And then start googling or asking about what each module does. Also, I would look at the custom theme, hopefully under sites/default/themes/name-of-the-theme and analyze each file in there. Good luck to you.