I am excited to let you know of two new classes on Drupal; Drupal Website Development and Customizing Drupal Themes. Our first class, Drupal Website Development, is starting on July 1st. Please contact me if you have any questions, and I appreciate you helping me get the word out about our classes.
Drupal Website Development
Learn to leverage the built-in functionality of Drupal, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, to create robust E-commerce applications, Social Networking sites, Web Picture Galleries and more. Helpful experience: Web 101 or equivalent, and familiarity with PHP and databases (mainly MySQL).
Thursday evenings, 6 – 9 pm
July 1 – Aug 5, 2010
Tuition: $295.00Class Reference Number (CRN): 34101
Location: Willow Creek Center / WCC Room 213 (in Beaverton)
Instructor: Michael H Ewan
Sign up at: www.pcc.edu
Comments
Class on Customizing Drupal Themes
What's the schedule for this class?
The class is 6:00 PM-9:00 PM,
The class is 6:00 PM-9:00 PM, Thursday evening, 01-Jul-2010 thru 05-Aug-2010
John
Sylabus for the course?
Do you have a sylabus for the course? I'm curious to see what it's about so I can see if it's worth endorsing to budding programmers.
Jesse Nicola -- Shredical six different ways to Sunday! -- My Portfolio
Drupal Class Sylabus
Sorry for the delay in replying. Here is the syllabus for the drupal class. Thanks for your interest in it.
John
CEU 935C Installing and Managing Drupal
Instructor: ___________________________________
Email: ___________________________________
Course Syllabus
Course Description
Learn to leverage the built-in functionality of Drupal, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, to create robust E-commerce applications, Social Networking sites, Web Picture Galleries and more.
Helpful experience: Web 101 or equivalent, and familiarity with PHP and databases (mainly MySQL).
Class Meetings
This is a 24 hour class and it will meet once a week for 8 weeks for 3-hours.
Class Textbook
“Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6”
By: David Mercer Publisher: Packt Publishing Pub. Date: April 04, 2008 Print ISBN-10: 1-84719-297-1 Print ISBN-13: 978-1-84719-297-4
Ground Rules
• There are no dumb questions in this class. All questions are welcome.
• Interruptions are okay, feel free to raise your hand or throw something at the instructor. Ask questions at any time. The topic might be covered later, the instructor will say so if that’s the case.
• Please participate. This class will be more fun and interesting if everyone participates in discussions.
• There will be reading assignments; you are expected to complete the reading by the next class session.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course you will be able to:
• Install and configure Apache to support Drupal and other CMS’s.
• Install MySQL and do basic database and table creation to support Drupal.
• Install and configure Drupal
• Set up a basic web site, change the theme, add content, upload files, and display photos.
• Install third party modules and themes to support CMS functionality.
• Setup security, roles and users to support multi-user access and editing.
• Configure Apache and Drupal for multi-site.
Class Schedule
Week 1: Getting Started
Reading: Chapters 1, 2 and A
• What is a CMS/CMF
• What is Drupal, and what does it have to offer
• Planning your site
• Setting up a development environment
• A brief introduction to the technologies involved
• Obtaining and installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP
• Obtaining and installing Drupal
• Troubleshooting common problems
• A short tour of Drupal
Week 2: Getting Started cont.
Reading: Chapters 3 & 4
• Common installation problems
• Creating a basic Drupal page
• Customizing the basic pages using built in themes, graphics, text colors and fonts
• Adding modules
• Third-party modules
• Configuring modules
• Working with blocks
• Menus, primary and secondary links
Week 3: Site Configuration
Reading: Chapters 5 and 6
• Clean URLs
• Error reporting
• File system and file uploads
• Logging and reports
• Site information
• Site maintenance
Week 4: Security and Access control
Reading: Chapter 8
• Planning an access policy
• Roles
• Users
• Access rules
• Content overview
• Content types
• Working with content
• Content-related modules
Week 5:
Reading: Chapter 10
• Planning a web-based interface
• CSS
• Themes
Week 6: Managing you site
Reading: Chapter 7 and 9
• Backups
• Cron and scheduled tasks
• Website activities—including paths, xml sitemaps, and user maintenance
• Search engine optimization and website promotion
• Upgrades
Interesting choice of
Interesting choice of approach. Is this an "advanced" class at PCC, which presumes the people entering have a solid knowledge of HTML/CSS, and at least a basic grasp of PHP?
Also, is this focusing on bringing in developers or designers?
Anyways, I'd skip the following in favor of advanced themeing:
• Install and configure Apache to support Drupal and other CMS’s.
• Install MySQL and do basic database and table creation to support Drupal.
• Configure Apache and Drupal for multi-site.
All that stuff is pretty advanced for a designer to know if they can't even build a basic custom theme of their own from the ground up. I'd infact focus on showing students Views, CCK, and Content-template, alongside the PHPengine templating system, to create custom themes and enable custom content creation. It's a vastly stronger skill to have, it isn't that difficult, and it really breaths life into Drupals potential as a developers CMS.
I of course presume you know how to do all of this, but if you don't, I'd be really happy to run you through the above in a rather quick fashion. It's really easy to create powerful custom Drupal sites, with no visible evidence that it's drupal based!
Jesse Nicola -- Shredical six different ways to Sunday! -- My Portfolio
My .02
Teaching a course on Drupal is never easy, as you are always faced with the daunting choice of what to leave out. As Jesse points out, you could regain some valuable instructional time by skipping the sections on server maintenance.
Views, CCK, the theming layer, evaluating modules, and basic version control would also be areas that could benefit people at different levels of Drupal/web development experience.
Some work around groups, taxonomy, and content types would also be useful, as this is an area where people often make architectural decisions that need to get rolled back later in the build.
Also, the work on multisite could probably be omitted in favor of more instruction from the perspective of a site builder/site maintainer.
And lastly, organizing the course around class material/annotated links to enrichment materials (for things like server config, etc that don't fit into the class) could be a way to maximize instructional hours while providing useful resources that students can choose to access on their own time.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Classes...
The workshops I taught I went over a little bit of stuff related to the server, but stuck with what most people will find they have - a control panel and PHPMyAdmin.
I showed how to create the db, db user, grab a backup, etc. Nothing as complex as installing server software. Drupal developers don't do a whole lot of that. Most of us leave that to server admin people. I get a server that is fully managed so I can ask them to do that stuff. All I need to know is what versions I need.
Jenni Simonis
http://www.forwardsupport.com
Choosing class content...
Thanks for the comments and suggestions! Choosing and positioning a class, what it covers and how it fits with other classes, is a challenge. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don't. This Drupal class is positioned to follow a series of other classes, including Web Development 101/102, HTML, Dreamweaver, Javascript and PhP, so the students do come into it ready to learn Drupal. And so far it looks like it fits well with the other classes we offer.
But there are so many other skills and areas that can be covered! I agree that building themes is really important and that is why we are offering a new class on that: Customizing Drupal Themes, (Aug 6th - 27, Fri evenings 6-9 pm). I think it will be quite popular.
My hope is that these two Drupal classes are just the start. Lots more that we can offer in the future!
John Buesseler
john.buesseler@pcc.edu
I see. I'd be interested in
I see. I'd be interested in seeing that curriculum over this. Are you teaching that course as well?
Jesse Nicola -- Shredical six different ways to Sunday! -- My Portfolio