Drupal Dojo Lesson Ideas and Interactive workshop wiki

There are some great ideas for future lessons brewing here, so I thought it might be smart to put them all in once place. Hence, the "Drupal Dojo Lesson Ideas wiki". Edit away, folks. :) Hint: There's an 'edit' tab at the top of this node.

If anybody wants to take on one of these lessons (as a teacher/guru) stick your name in there somewhere.

Projects and collaborative workshops

• Google Highly Open Participation Contest - Give student contestants the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development, from writing code and documentation to preparing training materials and conducting user experience research.
  • List of tasks and issues
  • Tips on how to write a good task
  • Drupal's GHOP group
• Google Summer of Code - a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.
  • Summer of Code on Drupal.org
  • Summer of Code 2007 Working Group

Collaborative workshop ideas

• Drupal Dojo 2.0. - http://groups.drupal.org/node/7228

  • Repository for all Dojo training and learning materials
    • Live lessons
    • Online training library (audio, video, slideshows)
  • An environment for collaborative learning and interactive workshops
    • Interactive case studies
    • Work on essential projects important to the community
    • Build complete sites
  • Aggregate news and learning materials from other sources
  • A project management/case tracking system
  • Could form a framework for a 'learning portal/project management' type of product/profile

• Drupal Store for the Association - http://groups.drupal.org/node/7536

  • E-commerce element may be a good fit for multiple Drupal properties (including DrupalDojo)
  • Could form a framework for a 'e-commerce' type of product/profile

• Views 2: Call for help -

  • Views 2 is currently being updated for Drupal 6 compatibility, but it needs major help in order to be ready for the Drupal 6's approximate release date
  • This is not an idea - this is an urgent call to action
  • http://groups.drupal.org/node/7206
  • http://drupal.org/node/193346#new

• Panels 2: Call for help

  • Panels working group - http://groups.drupal.org/panels
  • Current panels 2 status and needs - http://groups.drupal.org/node/5047

• Enterprise CRM Integration: Integrating Drupal with Customer Relationship Management solutions such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, [Tiger], etc.

  • Refactor the Salesforce module to make for greater flexibility and usefulness.
  • Thoughts on how to refactor the Salesforce module - http://groups.drupal.org/node/7065
  • Enterprise CRM Integration working group - http://groups.drupal.org/enterprise-crm-integration

• Anatomy of a theme project: not just theming, or CSS or PHP per se, but rather, which theme to use as a springboard (tableless?), how the process goes, how to separate graphic design from coding so people of different disciplines can work together, best practices, all the stuff you have to do to get it done and it what order. (suggested by victorkane)

  • Would get us all on the right path to theming, something that people find the hardest to share in the drupal community. Could be integrated with the Themer Pack Working Group (http://groups.drupal.org/themer-pack-working-group), for example. Could be started up by a single class presentation.

• "Project Flow and Tracker" - I've been chatting online with Victor Kane and he's willing to go through his use of drupal for "web application factory pattern". He was willing to do a one-on-one online walkthrough with me, but I thought it would be worth a dojo session that could be captured and available to the wider community. Victor did two presentations around this topic at DrupalCon Barcelona. (I'm willing to facilitate and do any capturing/compressing of screencasts - siliconmeadow)

  • More info here - http://drupal.org/node/178076

• Web application development process: best practices in getting the ball rolling on the web development cycle and turning user needs (what are they?) into usable code that works (suggested by victorkane).

  • Absolutely fundamental for getting anything done really, for not painting yourself into a corner, for ensuring that you can bring exciting projects to completion and comply with the original plan and requirements.

• Bookmarking and submissions

• dojo session on the history of the project

• intro to drupal 6
• how to build a community site with Drupal 6 - a ten part dojo series

Lesson Ideas

• All About CCK, its power, using with views, theming, etc (from lapur)

  • Pros: upgrade paths (new field(set)s) are free, self-normalizing, when you have no need for advanced forms it's easy to set up, ConTemplate module for customizing the regular "node view"
  • Cons: performance hit (depending on mem/CPU and the number of non-anonymous requests (which can't be cached)), when you need advanced forms things can become a bit "hacky"

• So, what's the big deal with Forms API

  • Pros:
  • Cons:

• Redo of Lesson #2, Coding Standard && Drupal Security

  • Pros: would yield a better recording
  • Cons: already been done, poor use of resources?

• Making Drupal not look like Drupal (i.e. theming)

  • This knowledge desperately needs to be shared. Josh already has a great example with workingcalifornians.com. It'd be great if he could show us how he used panels to make it.

• Drupal CVS and project.module: how to check out, how to roll patches, how to start a project, how to commit (from joshk... but it looks like Greggles may actually give this lesson!)

  • Pros: seems like a lot of people want this and it's good and important to know
  • Cons: covering the installation of a CVS application is out of scope (too many options on too many systems) and depending on what app you use, my example may or may not be very useful.

• Drupal Overview: a wider "best practice" lesson that tries to cover every major aspect of the core system. (from joshk)

  • Pros: would have pretty good appeal
  • Cons: kinda boring for me; I sort of want to do this with a good script so as to make a great long-lasting screencast archive.

• Great Contrib Modules: talk about popular contributed modules, how to use them/extend them to make a great site. (from joshk)

  • Pros: might open some eyes to some possibilities; important to know if you have big site dreams
  • Cons: could be hard to keep focused; might be better to do one module at a time
  • List of 10 most popular modules, good starters would be views, event, cck

• Drupal and Performance: optimizing your Drupal code for high-performance (from dami)

• Taxonomy / Categories
      A good introduction on the use of taxonomy could be read at http://www.drupal.org/node/81589
      A better session would be creating a taxonomy on a real world example from beginning to a finish product.
      Comment: If we're going to do taxonomy, I'd really like to understand the difference between all the different contrib access modules; when use which?; how do they differ? Why are there so many? Why hasn't some of this made it back into core? How can I help accomplish that?

• To be or not to be (a node)

  • Pros: Since I'm active on d.o there has always been a discussion about content being a node or not. There is an endless amount of threads asking if forum posts, images, comments, guest book entries, etc. should be nodes or not. E.g. should images be nodes (image.module) or not (acidfree, imce)? The node question is one of the questions that i still have no idea about.
  • Cons: More theory than practice, hard to do hands-on.

• Drupal and Javascript / Ajax

  • Overview of Drupal javascript abilities, show basic jQuery features, what can be done, how can you improve your user interface with ajax
  • AND - how about a quickie on how to implement that nifty banner spinner (carousel) from drupaldojo.com

• i18n, how to realize and maintain a multi-lingual web page in Drupal (I would be willing to help out with setting up a lesson - incrn8)

  • Pros: very useful module which has some quirks - a hands-on demo would be very helpful
  • Cons: maybe not everybody does multi-lingual sites

• Debugging techniques for PHP

  • How do I inspect the contents and structure of an object, when var_dump() doesn't show me anything useful?
  • How do I set up a productive development environment?
  • What other tools are useful for debugging (devel module, phpDebugger, etc.)?

• Overview of Drupal's database schema and functions

  • I've had problems in the past just trying to figure out where the data is located so I could write better sql statements
  • Overview of the essential db functions
  • Understanding the relational structure
  • Maybe highlight differences in mysql vs. pgsql

• Moving data from an existing database to Drupal (including relational data that could not be imported via import module etc) - (by NicolasH)

  • Pros: Problem faced by many people + can be a huuuuge time saver
  • Cons: A bit hard to do with the presentation format - would require example database distributed to users before lesson

• Setting a test site

  • deploying it when ready
  • backing up database and files (with php script or sh script or otherwise)

• Access Control - Howto best implement and test.

• File Handling - Public vs Private, and what does Drupal actually do here, how can I implement certain file verification techniques?

• Configurable User Profiles - Is profile.module enough?

• image module run down

  • compare & contrast various image modules and detail how to implement them

• votingapi howto

• Organic Groups howto.

• Menu hacks: Clam shell style, drop-downstyle, AJAXed menus