Interested in going from Drupal newbee to Drupal ninja? Study group forming now!

I am definitely interested, but would recommend using "The definitive guide to Drupal 7"(Apress) instead of "Pro".
The pro book was written before the D7 release, and as you know D7 was a little rough edged even after it was released, so pro tends to be a little sketchy about d7. I've seen both books and find that "DGD7" has a much better documentation of the new d7 systems, as it was published last year instead of in 2010. DGD7 also has a good website and goes thru the development of an actual project that was released on d.o. (Check out the Xray module). DGD7's theming section was written by the head of the D8 HTML5 initiative.

I have the Kindle version of The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7. I still haven't finished it but it would be my vote.

Count me in. I would love to participate in the group.

I am in

:-)

I would also like to join the group.

I would love to join this study group. What like a great opportunity to further drupal skills.
Thanks...

I'm in

I have been following this thread and am thinking of throwing in, however I am uncertain if the group has begun, what day and time the meetings are held etc. If anyone can provide more information I would appreciate it.

Hi all, Sorry for the delay here. I got wrapped up in a big project that consumed all of my time for the past couple of weeks. We will launch the study group with 3 weeks. The interested parties right now out number the capcity of the room I have available. There were also some folks interested in a North County version, versus downtown. Is anyone willing to pick up the North County group, and hence allow us to split into two groups of about 10? I will send more details shortly. Thanks for your interest! Doug

I am definitely in if we get a North County Study Group going.

Here is the North County Group page:
http://groups.drupal.org/north-county-san-diego-dug

We meet the last Thursday of every month in Carlsbad.

Since most work with clients occurs during the day, making this would be tough. i'd like to go through a 12 week dgd7 as Doug originally suggested. Will be thinking of it over time. Via de la Valle seems a good centralized meeting point for northerners as well as those in the south?

Who's interested in meeting Tuesday evenings at Pannikins Del Mar (Via de la Valle)?
If so, is 7 to 9pm good?

I can schedule it on http://www.meetup.com/Solana-Beach-Drupal-Meetup/

Hello all N2Ners,
Doug Hoffman has been real busy of late, so here is a proposal for getting our N2N classes underway.

Class focus
Although Doug titled his class Newbie to Ninja, (he's good at marketing as well as drupal!) we feel the best approach is to actually focus on more of a site-builder to proto-developer track. That being said, everyone is welcome, come learn and contribute, but we won't be starting at ground zero. It will be best if you've built several sites and are good at getting around drupal and development tools. For example; we'll be working a lot with drush and git. You don't have to be an expert by any means, we will all be working together to learn and share tricks of the trade, but you should be comfortable with the command line and the basic system syntax of these systems.

Books
There are 3 main books out there, Pro7: Pro Drupal Development 7 (apress), DGD7: Definitive Guide To Drupal 7 (apress), and D7MD: Drupal 7 Module Development (packt). Each has it's strengths.

Pro7is a classic, and has a lot of detailed info on fundamental drupal systems like the menu router and FAPI, as well as a good module development track.

D7MD has a great step by step module development progression for D7, probably the best of the lot, and it is more up to date than Pro in handling the changes that came with D7.

DGD7 is the most recent and up to date, but was written by a rather large committe and so is a little less cohesive. What it does offer though is a lot of insights into the "real world" scenarios you encounter when working with Drupal, like "glue code" module building.

We've got access to all the books, so the current plan is to go with DGD7 as the main text, and then borrow info here and there from the others to fill in some gaps.

Note
There are no teachers in this class! We'll have a topic list to focus on each week, but it's up to all of us to contribute and make the class productive.

Class WebSite
The plan is to build out a drupalN2N site for all of us to use to share code, info and resources. We'll spin up a Pantheon platform for the class to use, which will give us dev and test sites to work with and we can code away from there.

Class Learning Schedule
We'll take the agile approach!
About 12 weeks of meetings for the first round, with 6 two-week sessions.
Sprint and then evaluate our progress.

We'll use the first meeting to take a look at a topic/chapter list, gather our "user stories" and decide on where we want the class to go over the next sessions.
Plus go over some basics like:
development environments & IDEs
git, drush,
hosting mechanics,
resources & management

Mechanics:
We'll need to set up who is attending, north vs south, and the final locations and times.
Looks like North is moving towards Tuesdays 7-9 at the Via de la Valle Pannikin.
South will be at Sage Tree, most likely the same time frame, on a day of the week to be decided.

I will spin up the N2N site soon and you can sign up and select North/South and vote on Time/Day, etc.

Comments welcome,
Thanks to Doug Hoffman for lighting the fire.

I'd also be interested in joining the group. I live in the Murrieta area. Every Drupal Users Group is an hour away in every direction, so any movement of the "North" meetup toward the East (Highway 15 corridor?) would be greatly appreciated. Gas is now at $4.35 up here. I have the Drupal 7 Module Development book. I got to about page 77 before it became too difficult. Looking forward to possibly understanding it all the way through!

I would be interested in carpooling to the NCDUG, but probably not tonight, as they do not have a topic yet. To drive (or be driven) for an hour, I need a topic. :) Maybe the local Murrieta/Temecula Drupal fans can meet up locally first to get to know each other a bit? Someplace with WiFi preferably. Maybe we can start a new topic for this opportunity. Tweet at @MyDrupalJourney

N2N, I'm RSVPing first! :D

And I'd prefer if people can bring their own drinks & snacks (because I wanna eat & drink my own), but that's just me and not a biggie.

Hello all,

Ready or not (and I am not sure I am ready!), we are going to kick off the downtown study group this week on Thursday March 8th at 7pm at the Sage Tree offices at 752 5th Avenue. Your best bet for parking is at Horton Plaza (2 blocks away from the east parking entrance) where you get 3 hours free. Give yourself enough time to go into the plaza before coming to Sage, as the validation machines stop at 9pm, but if you get your ticket validated at say 6:45pm, then it's good to get out for free up until 9:45pm. If you mess up, it's $2/15mins, so don't mess up.

The Sage meeting room is not too big, so please RSVP ASAP to me via email to doug@customersucessmarketing.com (please include your first/last name, cell phone # and email address) so I will know if we will be sitting on the floor or have enough chairs for everyone.

This first meeting will be mainly to meet each other, do an Agile-like voting mechanism on the agenda for each of the following 8-10 weeks. I would like to have everyone commit to being the lead moderator for one week of the study group.

Please plan on having access to Pro Drupal 7 Development and The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 for the duration of the course as we plan to use both books for reference.

See you Thursday, Doug

Doug Rowe's suggested plan for your reference:

Hello all N2Ners,
Doug Hoffman has been real busy of late, so here is a proposal for getting our N2N classes underway.

Class focus
Although Doug titled his class Newbie to Ninja, (he's good at marketing as well as drupal!) we feel the best approach is to actually focus on more of a site-builder to proto-developer track. That being said, everyone is welcome, come learn and contribute, but we won't be starting at ground zero. It will be best if you've built several sites and are good at getting around drupal and development tools. For example; we'll be working a lot with drush and git. You don't have to be an expert by any means, we will all be working together to learn and share tricks of the trade, but you should be comfortable with the command line and the basic system syntax of these systems.

Books
There are 3 main books out there, Pro7: Pro Drupal Development 7 (apress), DGD7: Definitive Guide To Drupal 7 (apress), and D7MD: Drupal 7 Module Development (packt). Each has it's strengths.

Pro7is a classic, and has a lot of detailed info on fundamental drupal systems like the menu router and FAPI, as well as a good module development track.

D7MD has a great step by step module development progression for D7, probably the best of the lot, and it is more up to date than Pro in handling the changes that came with D7.

DGD7 is the most recent and up to date, but was written by a rather large committe and so is a little less cohesive. What it does offer though is a lot of insights into the "real world" scenarios you encounter when working with Drupal, like "glue code" module building.

We've got access to all the books, so the current plan is to go with DGD7 as the main text, and then borrow info here and there from the others to fill in some gaps.

Note
There are no teachers in this class! We'll have a topic list to focus on each week, but it's up to all of us to contribute and make the class productive.

Class WebSite
The plan is to build out a drupalN2N site for all of us to use to share code, info and resources. We'll spin up a Pantheon platform for the class to use, which will give us dev and test sites to work with and we can code away from there.

Class Learning Schedule
We'll take the agile approach!
About 12 weeks of meetings for the first round, with 6 two-week sessions.
Sprint and then evaluate our progress.

We'll use the first meeting to take a look at a topic/chapter list, gather our "user stories" and decide on where we want the class to go over the next sessions.
Plus go over some basics like:
development environments & IDEs
git, drush,
hosting mechanics,
resources & management

Mechanics:
We'll need to set up who is attending, north vs south, and the final locations and times.
Looks like North is moving towards Tuesdays 7-9 at the Via de la Valle Pannikin.
South will be at Sage Tree, most likely the same time frame, on a day of the week to be decided.

I will spin up the N2N site soon and you can sign up and select North/South and vote on Time/Day, etc.

Comments welcome,
Thanks to Doug Hoffman for lighting the fire.

To clarify ticket validation at Horton Plaza, I believe the clock starts ticking the minute you pull the ticket to get into the parking garage. For those that have never parked there, you can get it validated at any of the machines located throughout the mall on your way to Sage Tree Solutions: http://westfield.com/hortonplaza/assets/pdfs/hortonFAQ0911.pdf

Hey guys,
I'm sitting here in Pannikin - is the newbie meetup still going down? Has it been moved somewhere?

Kurt

Just a quick reminder that we kick-off the Downtown Drupal 7 Study Group tonight at 7pm @ Sage Tree 752 Fifth Ave. Hope to see you there. Please RSVP to me if you will be joining the group! Thanks, Doug Hoffman - Drupal Convert Since 2009!

Douglas C. Hoffman
Principal @ The Lakewood Group San Diego
Mobile: 858.442.3414
Email: Doug@CustomerSuccessMarketing.com
Web: www.The-Lakewood-Group.com
LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/douglaschoffman
Skype: doughoffman
Twitter: douglaschoffman
D.O: douglaschoffman

From: Douglas C Hoffman [mailto:doug@customersuccessmarketing.com]
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 9:56 PM
To: 'dianafarias09@gmail.com'; 'mike@lifeguardadventures.com'; 'pgiblin@451degrees.com'; 'bapat.anjali@gmail.com'; 'ken@kroel.com'; 'rallson@hotmail.com'; 'cwebersd@gmail.com'; 'wash_cal489@yahoo.com'; 'julie@clearlycoded.com'; 'alsa10@hotmail.com'; 'mkovacevic@ucsd.edu'; 'joneslawr@gmail.com'; lee@sagetree.net; 'Zakiya Khabir'; 'Burt Lo'; 'Doug Rowe'
Cc: Susan Rust (susan@drupalanywhere.com); rmy@sagetree.net; Karl Scheirer
Subject: First downtown study group meeting! Thu Mar 8th 7pm @ Sage Tree - 752 5th Av

Hello all,

Ready or not (and I am not sure I am ready!), we are going to kick off the downtown study group this week on Thursday March 8th at 7pm at the Sage Tree offices at 752 5th Avenue. Your best bet for parking is at Horton Plaza (2 blocks away from the east parking entrance) where you get 3 hours free. Give yourself enough time to go into the plaza before coming to Sage, as the validation machines stop at 9pm, but if you get your ticket validated at say 6:45pm, then it's good to get out for free up until 9:45pm. If you mess up, it's $2/15mins, so don't mess up.

The Sage meeting room is not too big, so please RSVP ASAP to me via email to doug@customersucessmarketing.com (please include your first/last name, cell phone # and email address) so I will know if we will be sitting on the floor or have enough chairs for everyone.

This first meeting will be mainly to meet each other, do an Agile-like voting mechanism on the agenda for each of the following 8-10 weeks. I would like to have everyone commit to being the lead moderator for one week of the study group.

Please plan on having access to Pro Drupal 7 Development and The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 for the duration of the course as we plan to use both books for reference.

See you Thursday, Doug

Doug Rowe's suggested plan for your reference:

Hello all N2Ners,
Doug Hoffman has been real busy of late, so here is a proposal for getting our N2N classes underway.

Class focus
Although Doug titled his class Newbie to Ninja, (he's good at marketing as well as drupal!) we feel the best approach is to actually focus on more of a site-builder to proto-developer track. That being said, everyone is welcome, come learn and contribute, but we won't be starting at ground zero. It will be best if you've built several sites and are good at getting around drupal and development tools. For example; we'll be working a lot with drush and git. You don't have to be an expert by any means, we will all be working together to learn and share tricks of the trade, but you should be comfortable with the command line and the basic system syntax of these systems.

Books
There are 3 main books out there, Pro7: Pro Drupal Development 7 (apress), DGD7: Definitive Guide To Drupal 7 (apress), and D7MD: Drupal 7 Module Development (packt). Each has its strengths.

Pro7is a classic, and has a lot of detailed info on fundamental drupal systems like the menu router and FAPI, as well as a good module development track.

D7MD has a great step by step module development progression for D7, probably the best of the lot, and it is more up to date than Pro in handling the changes that came with D7.

DGD7 is the most recent and up to date, but was written by a rather large committee and so is a little less cohesive. What it does offer though is a lot of insights into the "real world" scenarios you encounter when working with Drupal, like "glue code" module building.

We've got access to all the books, so the current plan is to go with DGD7 as the main text, and then borrow info here and there from the others to fill in some gaps.

Note
There are no teachers in this class! We'll have a topic list to focus on each week, but it's up to all of us to contribute and make the class productive.

Class WebSite
The plan is to build out a drupalN2N site for all of us to use to share code, info and resources. We'll spin up a Pantheon platform for the class to use, which will give us dev and test sites to work with and we can code away from there.

Class Learning Schedule
We'll take the agile approach!
About 12 weeks of meetings for the first round, with 6 two-week sessions.
Sprint and then evaluate our progress.

We'll use the first meeting to take a look at a topic/chapter list, gather our "user stories" and decide on where we want the class to go over the next sessions.
Plus go over some basics like:
development environments & IDEs
git, drush,
hosting mechanics,
resources & management

Mechanics:
We'll need to set up who is attending, north vs. south, and the final locations and times.
Looks like North is moving towards Tuesdays 7-9 at the Via de la Valle Pannikin.
South will be at Sage Tree, most likely the same time frame, on a day of the week to be decided.

I will spin up the N2N site soon and you can sign up and select North/South and vote on Time/Day, etc.

Comments welcome,
Thanks to Doug Hoffman for lighting the fire.

Hope to see you all tonight at Sage Tree located in the Gaslamp at 752 Fifth Ave. Tonight's topic is dev tool - Doug & Zakiya.

Helpful reading and site:

http://www.drush.org

http://drupal.org/project/quickstart

The Definitive Gudie to Drupal 7
Part 1 Getting Started
Chapter 1: Building a Drupal Site
Chapter 2: Essential Tools>: Drush and Git
Chapter 12: Development Environment
Chapter 13: Putting a Site Online and Deploying New Features
Chapter 26: Drush

I knew there was someone else to thank. They are my absolutely favorite cookie, and it's great that they are low fat too! ;-)

Hey Milan,
I can present a overview of modules grouped by general functions, and highlighting some of the key players in each group.
I also posted the readings to the Pantheon site, under the class schedule listings.
-Doug Rowe
PS: thanks to Zakiya for the great git drush overview.

Given that just about everyone in the group knows more about Drupal than I do, I thought I'd just touch on a few site building topics to maybe get a conversation going. Here's a sketch of what I have in mind for this evening:

1. Show a few short videos of example Drupal sites with an eye toward Data Visualization.
2. Look at two Development Environment Setups: Native OSX (MySQL & Apache) vs Installing Acquia DAMP.
3. Look at Views and the following features in a couple of websites (one basic and one more complex):
   • Content Types,
   • Modules,
   • People,
   • Tags,
   • Mini Panels,
   • Quick Tabs,
   • Exposed Filters.
4. Finally, Doug offered to look at modules in more depth.

I'll be presenting next week on Site Building (2 of 2). Suggested reading:

Chapter 8: Extending Your Site
Chapter 9: Drupal Community: Getting Help and Getting Involved
Chapter 10: Planning and Managing a Drupal Project
Chapter 32: User Experience

Since we went over a lot of the most useful modules last night (my favorite parts were the video about the visually stunning Swtor.com & Doug Rowe's module list), I'll take a different approach & talk about all the problems that I went through to get a working prototype ready for my tiny music startup, Discography.by, and how I conquered them.

I'll show some screenshots of the wireframes that I created to help with the visualization process, talk about mastering the art of finding the perfect module, go over some confusing parts about the different places I had to dig around to configure some modules & dive deep into all the main modules without which the project would've never been completed.

Site setup:
This week we will be doing some class exercises. Play along by setting up your own local dev environment. Follow the directions at http://dev.dn2n.gotpantheon.com/
(New class members should create an account to log in and see the class info)
Build your own d7 site and then apply the two files to update the db and sites/all folder.

Note: Thursday is opening day for the Padres. Game is at 4pm so traffic may be a bit heavy depending on if they are loosing and folks are headed to the bars already! (sorry pad fans)

See you there!
doug r

I got it working, although with a bunch of errors. I'm hoping it's just me. We'll see. :D

Hello all,
This is week two of theming, with a little jQ mixed in!
Check out the schedule at:
http://dev.dn2n.gotpantheon.com/
And download the zip file to update last week's site for this weeks adventure exercises.
Pad home game at 7pm, may be some traffic.
See you there.

Hi,
We are working on getting a new virtual study group going and I wanted to ask some questions about this group.

Ours will be a hybrid method of an online study group, Drupalistas Study Group, we had going at the beginning of the year and the Pro Drupal 7 study group that was held at Droplabs. We are giving the all-virtual method another go.

Ours will not be a training, per se, but a co-learning style of group. I'm curious as to how your meetings are going and if you are doing any projects in conjunction with your meetups.

Thanks for letting me 'butt in'...
K