Join us for Intro to Drupal 8 site building as part of the Drupal Global Training Days initiative!
Please sign up by registering for SoCal Code Camp and expressing your interest on the four Intro to Drupal 8 Site Building events in the Drupal track.
The training is broken up into four sessions as follows:
Session 1:
- Very quick recap of What is Drupal (please see Mario Hernandez' session)
- System requirements
- Installing Drupal
- Basic skills that will make you a better Drupal developer and/or site builder
- The difference between Drupal development and Drupal site building
- The Drupal configuration UI
- General site settings
- Overall site structure, including the menu (navigation) system and taxonomy
- Regional, date, and language settings and why they matter
- Drupal users
Session 2:
Session two will focus on Drupal 8 entities (content types, comments, taxonomy terms, blocks, and more), and customizing those entities to fit your specific needs.
Some examples of custom entities that you may want to create on your system include:
- Event content with dates and locations
- Location content with addresses and maps that can be re-used over and over again
- Entities with specific fields intended to map to matching fields on other systems
- But let your imagination run wild. If we have enough time, we can take a look at some of your specific
- use cases during the session and figure out how to build them through basic site-building tools.
We will also look at basic form customization options to make content entry more user friendly, and we will look at how entities are displayed and how we can modify these displays to fit our presentation model.
Session 3:
The third session will give you a comprehensive Introduction to Drupal 8 Site Building. Session three will focus on Views and Display Modes.
Views
Views are lists of content, and are used to present the user with the data they are seeking on your website (or the data you want them to see). Some basic examples of Views include:
- A calendar of events
- A slideshow or carousel
- River of news
- An RSS feed
- An image gallery
- A list of users or user pictures
- And... let your imagination run wild...
Display Modes (or View Modes)
These are not to be confused with Views. These are different modes of presentation for the same piece of content, depending on the context in which that content is viewed. Display modes are an extremely powerful tool for customizing the look and feel of your site, as well as of your content when presented beyond your site (think watches, mobile apps, digital billboards, etc.).
Session 4:
This final session will primarily be an outline for next steps, and how to genuinely embark on the journey of working with Drupal professionally.
We will look at some more intermediate topics including:
- Entity relationships (this is where Drupal can get really sophisticated!)
- Extending Drupal (including pointing you to some of our favorite contributed modules and themes for awesome non-out-of-the-box functionality)
- Deployment and security/maintenance best practices
- We will also review resources available to you as an up-and-coming Drupal developer or site builder, and the various paths you can take.
Thanks to SoCal Code Camp and its organizers (Todd Zebert) for letting us coordinate the Dec. 2, 2017 Global Training Day training with this event!