Building With Drupal: Rebuilding the new Drupal Dojo

Our goal is to create a curriculum and complete set of training materials derived from the process of building a new site for the Drupal Dojo (and subsequent 'Open Learning and Collaboration Portal' installation profile). We will provide hands on training in areas ranging from site planning, drafting proposals, project management, information architecture, development, design, infrastructure, to community, business, marketing, and program development.

Sessions

I. Business, Marketing, and Program Development

Workshop - http://groups.drupal.org/node/26724

Topics to cover:

• How to create a sustainable learning and training program
• Funding strategy and staffing requirements
• Proposal writing
• Creating engaging sessions and events
• Interfacing with the Drupal community without being bogged down by politics

Issues/tasks:

• Identify program stakeholders and potential sponsors - benefits and opportunities
• Establish program goals, guidelines, and policies
• Define program roles, responsibilities, and benefits
• Finalize Proposal for the Drupal Open Learning Initiative
• Finalize Sponsorship Packages for the Drupal Open Learning Initiative

II. Project Planning and Management

Workshop - http://groups.drupal.org/node/17044

Topics covered:

• Requirement Gathering
• How to write a Drupal based functional specification document.
• How to asses times for tasks and to break up the work
• Approaches to running Virtual Teams
• Ongoing monitoring of the work done/project management best practices.

III. Information Architecture

Workshop - http://groups.drupal.org/node/17045

Topics covered:

• User Roles and Permissions
• Workflows
• Taxonomy Structure
• Primary menu items
• Blocks
• CCK Node Types and fields
• User profile fields
• Views
• Panels
• Third party integration

IV. Designing for Drupal

• Designing for Drupal (Structure of a Drupal site, visualizing your design in Drupal…)
• Drupal-friendly CSS tricks (form elements, menus, etc)
• Making a Drupal site not look like one – new ways of theming common UI elements

Projects/tasks

• Create a design for DrupalDojo.com

V. Drupal Themeing

Workshop - http://groups.drupal.org/node/17046

• Converting mock-ups to Drupal themes
• Theming Panels
• Theming Views

Projects/tasks

• Convert the DrupalDojo.com design into a Drupal theme

VI. Infrastructure

Workshop - http://groups.drupal.org/node/17047

Topics covered:

Infrastructure (Nuts and bolts of code, servers, databases, etc.):

• Build environment and version control environment.
• Scaling Drupal, performance and scalability (server/database optimization and distribution)
• Virtual servers and virtual services ec2, s3

Development Workflow (Getting from code to production):

• Development environment (including USE of version control and build env.)
• Quality Assurance (following/implementing process, procedures, standards)
• Testing (unit testing, black and white box testing itself).

VII. Site configuration and development

Topics covered:

• Creating custom modules
• Improving the Drupal user experience with the best contributed modules
• Turning modules and site configurations into Drupal Features

Projects/tasks

• i. Content Sharing and Distribution
• ii. Project Management and Internal Communication
• iii. Pledge and Fundraising
• iv. Repository for Learning Materials
• v. Web Conferencing Integration
• vi. Event Scheduling and Workflow

VIII. Testing and site deployment

Workshop - http://groups.drupal.org/node/16962

Topics covered:

• Testing
• Launch - getting the website running on your preferred host.
• Site Optimization (SEO)
• Bug Fixes