Hello DrupalCampers.
Some things you need to know for the Drupal training next week.
Firstly, there are still a number of seats available for the course, if anyone is interested in joining us , please
contact me at adrian at bryght dot com.
What do I need to bring :
hardware
Your laptop, if you own one. If you do not own a laptop, a computer
will be made available to you, but we only have machines running linux
available.
software
Your favourite web browser. Preferably firefox. Internet Explorer is also suitable, but will likely get you ridiculed. (it's just the truth =) )
Your favourite text editor. Linux systems will have bluefish pre-installed. The course is not extremely code heavy, but a
text editor will be needed for the theme development unit.
Daily Schedule :
18:00 - 18:30 = Light supper.
Please try to refrain from eating too heavy a meal, as the course is fairly intensive,
and you need to be able to pay attention.
18:30 - 20:00 = Training.
20:00 - 20:30 = Tea/Coffee break.
20:30 - 22:00 = Training.
Course Outline :
I should add that this is tentative, I am putting in ample breathing
room for if one of the topics happens to overrun.
Please be aware that this is a very basic overview.
Unit 1 - Introductions:
What is Drupal?
Why should I use Drupal?
Where can I get Drupal?
How do I install Drupal?
Unit 2 - Building Drupal brochureware site :
Just what exactly are nodes?
Modules, and what they can do for me.
Taxonomy, and it's many uses.
Blogging and comments.
Some more core modules ..
Unit 3 - Theme development :
What is a theme ?
How the theme system is put together.
Overriding theme functions.
Creating new templates.
Splitting up static HTML into a theme.
Unit 4 - Drupal Contributions repository :
Introduction and overview of contrib.
How to evaluate and choose which modules to use.
Making content editing easier for real people (tinymce)
Running a newsletter
Image galleries
Some more contrib modules will also be covered.
Unit 5 - Advanced modules :
Introduction to CCK.
How to use the Views module to build sites.
and several other very powerful (and mostly new) features will be explored.
Comments
Feedback...
Does anyone want to share their experience? What did the rest of us miss out on?
Very well worth it
It was worth every minute and every cent. adrian is a very good lecturer, friendly, knowledgeable and relaxed. He travels with ease down the many paths we take him on into Drupal's innards with our questions and "oh, wow's" without losing track of the general course direction.
At first I was disappointed that we would not be learning much about coding the Drupal way, but the intricacies of implementation showed me that my approach in general needs to be fundamentally re-, erm, thought.
One of the greatest things about this course was getting to know the other people there. Don't mean that in a oh, they're nice way, though that is also true, but more... they were all capable and interesting people with many talents that was good to see exhibited, as it was, in relevance to the course, Drupal and they're respective needs for it.
...my approach in general
I'd be interested to hear you expand on this.
ex. DarkInter.net, I hope...
I ran Nukes and phpBBs before as well as checked out many of the other CMSs (XOOPS, Xaraya, Joomla etc.). Specifically, DarkLight is a long time site that to some extend got me and my community stuck on certain ways of doing things and how they should look. Thus, when I moved to Drupal, I "fought" the functionality in an attempt to make it fit the old sites' ways.
After watching some of the screen casts, attending and chatting to adrian at this get-together and getting to know Drupal a little better, I think the taxonomy access forum-focus site that DarkLight is can much better serve a much bigger community in the form of an OG implementation. Unfortunately I do not have much time for these labors of love, but I will attempt to have a better site up playing as much as possible down stream with functionality Drupal has, are available as well maintained additions and may make it to core soon.
I'll continue to run the old site and likely add a few things, but DarkInter.net is now a bit of an experiment to see how this works.