Dojo Lesson #9 -- Getting Started with Drupal Development

[Bumped --joshk]
Arising out of the Coffeetalk yesterday we are seeing that while we are making some breakneck pace in educating about the basics of drupal, we might not be so hot on keeping people up to speed on how the drupal dev community works, what projects are, and how to best work on new code with your fellow devs, and such.

We're looking to do a lesson regarding all this that will cover parts of the proposed Getting Started with Drupal Development outline and will hopefully let us put some of the lesson into action by helping fill out that document.

Additional Reference:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/best_practices_in_open_source_development

Main topics to be covered:
Intro
- Drupal’s development philosophies (core is small and lean, additional functionality added by contrib modules, no backwards compatibility with API, etc.)
- Overview of how development process works
- Overview of how documentation process works

Project Management
- Working with the issue queue (both from a user and maintainer perspective)
- Using d.o projects for code and collaboration

Support
- Mailing lists (developer mailing list, documentation mailing list.. what kind of discussion takes place there)
- IRC channels
- d.o forums (Handbook comments are NOT for support questions - heh, pet peeve here ;))
- Searching before asking (handbook, forums and list archives)

Dev tools
- api.drupal.org tour? (it has been seen in a few lessons but maybe a quick systematic walkthrough)
- Drupal’s database (an E-R diagram?) here is a http://webdevgeeks.com/schemaspy/relationships.html schemaspy ERD model - out of scope.
- “API-like” contrib modules (Views, CCK, OG, Actions, Voting API…) - out of scope
- Drupal patterns and snippets
- Methods and tools for functionality and security testing. - probably can't get into this too much; maybe point out resources like "How to handle text securely"?
- Coding standards/doxygen comments

Getting involved
- Helping out with user support (forums, #drupal-support...)
- Helping out with code (getting a cvs account, submitting patches, bug/patch bingo...)
- Helping out with documentation (becoming a documentation team member, filing issues, incorporating comments...)
- Helping out with translations (anyone able to talk on this point?? else, I can try and fudge through :) -angie)

PLEASE comment and or edit in changes and additions to this. This has been the subject of MUCH discussion and we want to know ANY questions people still have about how 'the drupal way' works.