Curriculum and Training

This poll revolving around the Knight News Challenge (http://www.newschallenge.org/) provides a good indicator of what developers usually get paid for a funded project - looks like the range of $50-100/hr is the norm (http://twtpoll.com/z0e5kz). I'm curious to 1) is this typical for other Drupal projects (possibly people could take the poll; 2) how much non-developers (pm, marketing, documentation, etc.) are being compensated; 3) how this compares to a client job (non-profit or other).

sorry for the late notice, I just realized this wasn't posted here

Zivtech is proud to announce two days of Drupal trainings, on Thursday June 25th and Friday June 26th. The trainings will be held at the beautiful Cira Center, which is conveniently located next to Amtrak/SEPTA's 30th Street Station.

Announcing our next Boston area Drupal training on Saturday, July 25, 2009, from 8:30AM to 6:00PM, in sunny Davis Square. If you've enjoyed the Drupaltherapy screencasts, then this is your chance to spend a day with the same level of high quality instruction in a supportive learning environment.

Check out the workshop annoucement for information on availability and registration.

As part of the Geo June activity, we've started a website to aggregate the work being done: http://www.geojune.org. We're aiming to provide documentation, demos of the developing modules, tutorials, etc.

There are many great Drupal learning resources, groups, and tools but they can be somewhat disconnected and spread out. Our goal is to unify and bring these efforts together to provide a complimentary program and platform that serves all Drupal learning initiatives needs and efforts.

For over a year LA Drupal has been recording our meetings and many of our events. View the videos online... http://drupal-la.blip.tv

Subscribe to our video podcast... http://drupal-la.blip.tv/rss (available directly on iTunes too)

We provide these videos for free for people to learn Drupal of course. Over the next handful of weeks you will see us release videos from our meetings and DrupalCampLA '08. Learn the basics of Drupal, theme design, module development, advanced views, Services module (Flash + Drupal), and many, many more topics all relating to Drupal.

Follow us on twitter... www.twitter.com/ladrupal

I just saw my latest Drupal article is now published on Adobe.com, and this is the first in a series I have produced.

"Read on to see how you can set up a Drupal site in just 10 steps. Learn about adding content, altering menus, modules, and themes, and how to get your site ready for search engines and users."

Read the article now at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_site_in_10_steps...

http://matthewm.org/blog/drupal-screencast-fbconnect-module-and-twitter-...

So I made my first attempt at a screencast. It's pretty simple and straight forward - I hope someone finds it useful. It just goes through activating fbconnect and twitter modules. I also go over some of the basic feature/function to get you up and running asap. Enjoy!

Does anyone know of an existing curriculum package that a teacher could use in high school, college, or youth group setting to train students in web design using Drupal? The students would have no previous web design experience.

If not, is anyone interested in contributing to a curriculum? Maybe using training modules you have already developed?

Thanks!

Drupal For NGOs is a monthly series of events aimed at empowering NGOs to implement and manage their websites by knowing which modules to use and how to configure them. Each month will cover a topic in detail, showcase recent projects, and feature a Drupal question and answer session.

Which topic is covered each month will be decided by a poll, so if there's something you'd like to know more about please cast your vote or make a suggestion.

Sun Microsystems is hosting this month's Drupal For NGOs, and will also be providing presentations on Scaling And Optimising MySQL and Backing Up MySQL Data.

We will also be giving away two Drupal books that Packt Publishing have generously contributed:

• Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions
• Building Powerful And Robust Websites With Drupal 6

Get A Ticket

The event is free, but you will need to RSVP if you would like to attend.

Hi there.

I'd like to announce that Em Space are now running Drupal training programs in Australia. Our venue's awesome , just a few metres from our office. We can cater for people who can't bring a computer.

You can read about our training here, and you can pay immediately by paypal for the developer training scheduled for April and June.

There is an interesting write-up about remote presentations on the Open Media g.d.o. made by Kevin (kreynen@drupal.org). From their experiences it seems like it should be feasible to make a habit out of remote Drupal presentations.

Victor Kane & Chris Charlton teach Advanced Drupal Views in Venice, CA.

LA Drupal resident members get a special $50 off (email for bulk ticket pricing).

Learn all the new concepts in the Views 2 module for Drupal, inside and out, even some object oriented design details to take back to work.

Learn about the new architecture in Views 2, learn Relationships, the new user interface, and become a master of the new multiple Display configurations.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW. Hurry, tickets will go fast! http://drupal-la-training-2009-march-15.eventbrite.com/

This workshop shows how you'll get the most out of display options like blocks and pages, plus how to theme your views with PHP templates. Take away masterful tips like how to embed views (meaning views within views), and some magical views that only a developer can love.

Victor Kane & Chris Charlton teach Drupal Site Building, based on Victor Kane's new book "Leveraging Drupal" in Venice, CA.

LA Drupal resident members get a special $100 off! (email for bulk ticket pricing)... and for an additional $35 people can get a signed copy of Victor Kane's book.

A full day training of with the author of "Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right," Victor Kane, and LA Drupal trainer Chris Charlton, training users and administrators of Drupal software. TICKETS ON SALE NOW. HURRY, THEY WILL GO FAST! - http://drupal-la-training-2009-march-14-ladrupal.eventbrite.com/

Three Days of Drupal Training in Reno Nevada!

Chris Charlton and Laura Scroggins are working together to provide two sets of Drupal training sessions.

There is a lot of teaching content out there, but there is no central place that can get you to all of it.

Yesterday we had a discussion about the future of resources aggregation and moderation for Drupal (e.g. videocasts, recordings, audio, write-ups,...). I've got a part (the first 30 minutes are missing) transcript of the IRC session at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgtrwwgw_1dtmqc5c2

There were basically 3 use cases:
1) Drupal Dojo where people come to teach and learn - sort of social network for learning and mentoring
2) A Drupal materials aggregator - that collects everything and that is community moderated
3) A moderated content list - where a list of comprehensive materials is made available

Now that the Dojo has it's very own 100-seat-capable DimDim account for online learning and collaboration (access info here), there should be all sorts of ways we can leverage the platform (and 1700+ members) to demonstrate the various uses of Drupal in educational settings and collaborate on tools and solutions.

Two Days of Drupal Training in Santa Barbara Starting at $150!
Chris Charlton and Laura Scroggins are working together to provide three Drupal training sessions.

March 18: Drupal Basics is a one day training session for new users of open source software Drupal. Participants will learn to install and configure Drupal software, community contributed modules, and Drupal themes. ($300)

March 19 - half-day: Drupal Administration is a half day training program for users and administrators of Drupal software. Participants learn to properly manage a Drupal site with emphasis on back-ups, updates, security, trouble shooting, and best practices. ($150)

March 19 - half-day: Drupal Theming An introduction to Drupal themes including contributed themes, purchased themes, themes you design and outsource, themes that you port to Drupal, and themes you design and implement. ($150)

Register for all three and save $100.

Two-Day Crash Course

In two days, participants will build from scratch a rock solid, commercially supported, aesthetically pleasing community website with an online store, without writing a single line of custom code.

I've worked up a skeleton of a session about building training programs for Drupalcon in DC. That's for training new users on a website, training new staff for a development handoff, training new developers on your staff, even for writing good training docs.

Those of you with a training persuasion, check it out and give me your feedback - and vote on it - if you are so inclined. Address is: http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/training-boosting-our-raw-capacity-p...

Drupaltherapy and Cambridge Community Television have teamed up to offer a one-day Drupal training in February. This training will take place on Feb 13, 9:30AM-6:00PM, at Cambridge Community Television in Cambridge, MA, lead by Sean Effel, an experienced Drupal trainer. The cost for this 8-hour bootcamp style training is $350.00 per seat and it will cover everything a beginner or novice should know about Drupal, from installation and configuration to contributed modules and themes.

This will be the 2nd planning session for what could be a new site/profile for the Drupal Dojo. We'll pick it up where we left off and plot a course for the next week. These are a few items we'll cover:

Development environment

BlakeLucchesi (http://groups.drupal.org/user/3107) has begun putting up the new dojo site on a development environment. We'll go over over that in more detail.

Planning, setup and configuration

Are you a community manager or web professional trying to sort out what to do with Drupal? Then our Minneapolis-based Concentrated Drupal Basic Training is for you.

Advantage Labs, a full-time Drupal development and hosting firm since 2005 will show you how to create, manage and extend a Drupal site, complete with functionality that will draw users in, keep them informed, and keep them coming back!

We're having a informal planning session regarding the short term and long terms goals for what could be a new site/profile for the Drupal Dojo and how project ties into the larger goals of growing the Drupal project, community, and economy.

Discussion points may include -

• Desired outcomes for the new website, associated deliverables, and the Dojo itself (what are the Dojos requirements)
• Potential use cases for the website and major components (Repository for learning materials, Virtual classroom and collaboration space, Patterns)
• Requirement Gathering

Hello,

Chris Hughes from Dimdim will be giving our a community a personalized demo of their powerful online meeting and collaboration platform. It provides a self contained solution with many key features:

• No Install to Start/Join meetings
• Easily Share your Desktop
• Audio & Video Conferencing
• Present PowerPoint and PDFs
• Private & Public Chat
• Whiteboard & Annotations
• Record and Playback Meetings
• Multiple Presenters

These are just some of the potential uses:

• An improved training platform for the Drupal Dojo, companies, and individuals

Just want to lay out the goals/objectives/resources from the various learning groups and see if we can identify some common goals and ways we can interface. I'll post this as a wiki in the hope we can collectively add resources, revise, and organize.

The following project initiative seeks to follow through with the Drupal Dojo 2.0 vision by building off complimentary sites and collaborating with existing teams. A collaboration with the Open Media Project will provide a unique opportunity to craft a custom program to provide development help, training, and documentation and marketing on a regional level.

Project Goals and Desired Outcomes

An effective learning, mentoring, and collaboration platform

Create a more effective platform to provide free online training, mentoring, and a showcase for Drupal. This goal encompasses these needs:

• Centralized repository for learning materials (video, audio, slideshows, documentation)
• Forum to attract, accept, and direct contributor time and resources
• Easy to use platform for real-time online mentoring

Use Cases

• Drupal Dojo will have a more effective platform to provide free online training, mentoring, and a showcase for Drupal.
• Local user groups could create a platform to provide free online training, mentoring, and a showcase for Drupal on a local level.
• Company intranet and project management site
• An online community where artists, activists from around the world could share, discuss, create and collaborate. Projects could be funded via contributions of stakeholders in the idea.
• An educational or arts organization could create an open learning portal for tutorials, how-tos, podcasts, and other materials that will educate and empower consumers, content providers, and producers; Aggregate news and learning materials from other sources; Provide an environment for collaborative learning and interactive workshops.

Several months have passed since the Dojo lost it's way a bit when some noble ninjas attempted to create a great deal of good for the Drupal project. In a group of 1500+ members, there is no way to achieve any sort of consensus to why it stalled, how it could succeed, or what the purpose was in the first place. There are, however, a lot of indicators that the concept/ideal of an open learning/mentoring group is solid and is worth reviving.

Pleased to announce that I've added a second class date to the Drupaltherapy session in Washington DC and now offer two classes that weekend.

New class:
Saturday Oct 25, 2008 - 9:30AM - 6:00PM

Both classes are identical, offering 8 hours of well developed entry level training in Drupal. The classes are priced to be affordable for individuals, non-profits and small businesses. To learn more visit: http://www.drupaltherapy.com/washingtondc

Hello, we are reworking the Drupal /support page. We want to include a link to Drupal training services. We've researched an initial list of training providers. http://drupal.org/node/313592 We would like to add companies that have Drupal training landing pages so that visitors can find good services.

If you want to be added to the list of Drupal training providers please provide a link to your training landing page, in the issue.

Kieran

My book review pasted from Amazon.com. I reviewed the book for the publisher but that never guarantees a good review, so read on.

I must say I was asked to review this book, and I was very excited to do so. I thought it'd be good to comment on areas for people who aren't familiar with Drupal on a daily basis yet, and to give you some background, I was very excited to read this book. I needed a book that had the words "Drupal 6" and "module development" in it and luckily this book was titled exactly that and delivered. So, to newbies and non-newbies I offer the following review.

If you're impatient and don't want to read this review all the way, then just know this book must be read by each programmer who will be tinkering with Drupal, so yes, I recommend it. This book is not for people learning how to use modules, this is for people who plan to code and build their own modules. This book is not large, has great learning material, and brings tons of info down from Drupal's web site documentation into stress-free chapters. One entire chapter (Ch. 2) covers how to do an entire module from scratch and following chapters show how expand that module and build, and build, and really get to know important APIs that come with Drupal core.

In all honestly, I'm jealous that most new users get to read something as collected as this to learn from. If you read this book you'll basically catch up with content I took months, if not over a year to explore and read online. I had also held off heavy Drupal 6 development for myself until a book like this came out, so we're in the same boat.

Later is better than never, right? So here is the summary of the Drupal training and certification at the Szeged 2008 Drupalcon (you can also watch the video of the full session).

The panel gathered together (from right to left):

• Jacob Redding (Rain City Studios)
• Joeri Poesen (Symbiotix)

This class is FULL! There is so much demand for this class that we are trying to put together a second training day on Oct 25 to meet the need. If you want to put yourself on the interested list, follow the link below and tell us.

Coming back to our nation's capital on October 24, 2008, this Drupaltherapy training session will be located at the Echoditto's downtown digs.

At drupalcon Szeged their was an interesting suggestion to define RDF for Drupal curriculums. Check the presentation.

Their was the suggestion to write down bullets of what need to be in the curriculum. To me however, their it is not yet enough clarity to start creating bullets. I'm looking forward to a discussion. Whatever your point, let this post be an invitation for a discussion.

One observation I've had from lurking in the Knight Drupal Initiative meetings is something that's haunted me before. If only I was good at writing a solid grant proposal and subsequent review and revisions, some of my pie-in the sky ideas might actually turn into something valuable for the community (and provide a self-sustainable way for me to contribute).

I'm posting this as a wiki for others to add notes or links - based on Neil's presentation we attended. I would suggest conversation / disagreement / further discussion about the recommendations herein happen elsewhere - i.e. in the comments, etc. :-)

My notes are now up -Neil

Notes on Scalability
Neil Drumm
SF Drupal User's Group
July 14, 2008

OVERVIEW

This is the Basic End-User Training Manual I've been meaning to contribute for a while. Thanks to my former bosses at Raised Eyebrow Web Studio for giving me the go ahead to rework it and contribute it back to the community!

Do you need a nonprofit site? Then our Minneapolis-based nonprofit Drupal training is for you. Advantage Labs, a full-time Drupal development and hosting firm since 2005, is looking to use our experience to smooth the way for 6-8 small/mid-sized nonprofits who need a website.

By the end of the 5 week training, each nonprofit will have their own basic website, nonprofit Drupal training PLUS 6 months of Advantage Lab's Drupal Alliance program - a program dedicated to support you through the first 6 months. Check out the full details at: Nonprofit Drupal Training: Build Your Own Basic Nonprofit Website.

Having launched ChinaOpen this saturday, we will be shifting from Adobe's Flex/AIR track into Drupal, from Tuesday July 15, 2008 on.

This is an "introduction to Drupal" type of training, detail as follows:

7月12日， ChinaOpen 第一站：adobe flex，详细请见 http://drupalchina.org/node/4782
从7月15日起, ChinaOpen 第二站： Drupal公开课程 ，
具体课程安排如下：

7月15 第一帧 Drupal 基础
将以drupal5.x版本讲述，暂定2008年7月15日上午9：30开始
主题：

1. Drupal简介及基础概念
2. 安装drupal（drupal5.8）

Play the screencast now

Following on the heels of a great thread, I put together a screencast using the CCK Filefield module as a container for video media files and then applying the jQuery Media module to play back those media files in the appropriate player/method. I've been looking for a replacement for the video.module for some time and I wanted to put this recipe under a microscope. Check it out the screenie, feel free to drop me a line if you loved or hated it.

As a preparation for Drupal training and certification session in Szeged Drupalcon, I proposed few members a quick brainstorming, to try and feel each one's expectations, visions and ideas.

Please edit the node, and add your thoughts inside it. The node should not make sense when it is read. It should be a gathering of un-edited ideas, that will be used as a base for the discussion.

Join us (and vote for us ;-) ) at the Drupal training and certification session in Szeged Drupalcon!
The session will try to cover as many aspects of the issue as possible, so we can have a clear view and action items, regarding our common effort, towards a collaborative database of Drupal training curriculums and courseware.

I am happy to announce the next Drupal therapy session, this time in our home town of Boston. This training will take place on July 25, 2008, in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA, right off the MBTA Red Line. You can learn all about it and register for the workshop here.

This page's target is to store all of the info that can't really be described in a sylibus but is crucial for every training shop to know.
What works and what doesn't, The types of projects or practicing material used, tips for addressing complex issues and how to build it up in the correct order...
I'll start this as an alphabetical list and as this broadns we can link out to seperate pages.

Course Time Frame:

We (in linnovate) started with 12 hour courses over two days 8hrs + 4hrs, Once we understood it was not enough we extended it to 16hrs over two days.

This group is wonderful and now that I've started to do some training myself I'd like to propose a few quick changes to the group pages.

1) The WIKI pages for course syllabuses are awesome, Can we branch these out to a new Page via the new panels functionality on G.D.O?

2) My classes as of late have focused on creating a site and a module over a period of time. Either in the section above or in a new section I'd like to upload a few "training" modules that are essentially the answers to a set of exercises that should be performed within a class.

thoughts, opinions?

The blog post on Drupaltherapy
Hosted on Blip

This screencast demonstrates the recipe for Imagecache and Imagefield (for CCK) to build a system for posting images on your Drupal website. This is a robust and flexible system for handling images and has a bright future with more helper modules born every day.

This micro-lesson depends on prior understanding of the CCK module and the Views module. This example uses Drupal 5 since the Image* modules for Drupal 6 are not available (yet).

Storing some relevant resources as we outline the sylibous for this.
A nice start from raincity

• Drupal themeing from design draft to theme

This two day course is designed for new and intermediate users of Drupal. Overview and best practices for installation and configuration of Drupal core, contributed modules, and themes. Includes user permissions and roles, site configuration, site information and maintenance, input formats, and post settings. Content types, taxonomy, panels, media, and views will be discussed in detail.
Two Break Out Sessions: "Practice Installations and Problem Solving" and "Design and Implement a Theme"