training

I'm back on to give another Dojo Lesson this coming Sunday at the usual time: 11am PST / 2PM EST / 4PM Buenos Ares / 8PM Belgium/Hungary. We'll convene in #drupal-dojo, and on our Skype/VNC lesson session and spend a couple hours addressing topics of concern to up-and-coming Drupalists.

Possible topics I'm thinking about: Node access, and simple jQuery magic. I'm relatively new to both of these, but I can show you what I know and it's enough to get started. Feel free to chime in with comments.

The Drupal Dojo is a relatively new community group dedicated to spreading best-practices and helping developers who are new to the system get up to speed and become masters in their own right. We hold virtual lessons and produce practical developer documentation in both written and screencast form. If you're a newcomer looking for help in grokking the system or an old hand who's tired of being told to clone yourself, consider joining us in the Dojo!

I'm back on to give another Dojo Lesson this coming Sunday at the usual time: 11am PST / 2PM EST / 4PM Buenos Ares / 8PM Belgium/Hungary. We'll convene in #drupal-dojo, and on our Skype/VNC lesson session and spend a couple hours addressing topics of concern to up-and-coming Drupalists.

UPDATE: Screencast torrent for this lesson is available.

UPDATE: Sunday's Lesson Will Be Focused On The Drupal 5 Themer Pack. There's also another g.d.o group for this if you find it very exciting. We'll talk about the aims of the project, cover drupal theme concepts in general, and get down and dirty with some template files.

The Drupal Dojo is a new community group dedicated to spreading best-practices and helping developers who are new to the system get up to speed and become masters in their own right. There's a shortage of Drupal talent, and everybody knows it. If you're a newcomer looking for help in grokking the system or an old hand who's tired of being told to clone yourself, consider joining the Dojo!

Note: Video is compressing, will be up later tonight.

I'm back on to teach another Dojo Lesson this Sunday at 11am PST (2PM EST, 4PM Buenos Ares, 8PM Belgium/Hungary). Topic is TBA, but see the great wiki page Matt Koglin pulled together and let's start a comment thread on it.

I'm open to doing a more high-level beginner-friendly session after last week's dive into NodeAPI. I'm also open to doing a practical "how do I make a site do xyz" type lesson. Once it's decided I'll edit this event node to include the topic and we can collect pre-reading, etc, as per usual.

Join us in #drupal-dojo on IRC, and on skype #+99001110025448968. You can also see my screen here.

Two other points to note:

• Greggles has stepped up in the IRC room to lead a session on how to use CVS to manage an official Drupal project. Awesome! He will be leading Lesson #5 on Sunday the 27th. [edit: see and edit the lesson plan wiki]
• SamTressler has offered to set up a session at Drupal Camp NYC where the Dojo lesson will be projected and people can take part; an exciting real/virtual world crossover!

Our third lesson debuts the new (and hopefully steady) time for my trainings, Sundays at 11am PST (my local timezone). This will also be my first lesson from "home base," which should be good in terms of increased audio quality and preparation/togetherness on my part. The day is Sunday the 14th, and the time translates into:

Vancouver: 11AM
New York: 2:00 PM
Buenos Ares: 4:00 PM
Belgum/Hungary: 8:00 PM

Join us in #drupal-dojo on IRC, and on skype #99001110017393450. You can also see my screen here.

The content of this lesson will be NodeAPI. Pre-reading documentation below the jump.

The Drupal Dojo will convene again this Thursday at 8pm EST (GMT -5). We will gather in #drupal-dojo, get on a worldwide Skypecast and fire up an improved screen-sharing application to do our lesson. We will also take time to debrief the work so far, talk about what we'd like to do going forward, and answer misc questions about the group and about Drupal.

The Lesson Plan

• Sound Check: make sure everyone can get on Skype and is in IRC
• Debrief: talk about how we've been doing, also about moving the regular lesson time to Sunday and/or starting other times
• Drupal Coding Standards: what they are; why they matter
• Keeping Your Code Clean: where to put stuff; how not to kludge
• Keeping Your Code Safe: how and why to use Drupal functions for text, links, input fields and database queries
• Making Your Code Intelligible: the tao of commenting
• Dojo Challenge!: review a patch for Drupal 5.0
• Documentation: lets keep the great documentation coming!

Feel free to comment on this post with feedback. I'm especially interested in collecting links to documentation folks may want to read ahead of time, and/or we should look at improving as a result of this lesson.

See you in the Dojo!

To my dear New York City, Drupalistas and soon to be Druaplistas,

We are two weeks away from DrupalCamp NYC 2, 20 & 21 Jan. A few of us have been thinking what if we concentrated our efforts on a single project instead of working solely on individual projects? I'm not talking about a classroom setting, but a project (ie install profile, module stuff and theme) to educate each other?

Well here is your opportunity to change the future of one lucky group. Big or small, non-profit or community organization... If you know of a project that can use the assistance of a Drupal site, we need you to nominate them. The lucky organization will also get one year of CivicSpace on Demand (hosted and managed install of Drupal 4.7 and CiviCRM + EMAIL)!

After some discussion in IRC, it seems that there's definitely interest in having "lessons" here at the Dojo. Ideas range from HOWTO on specific features and topics to having creators of interesting sites lead the group in an under-the-hood tour. Really, the sky is the limit.

It is my intention to try and make lesson-time be a recurring weekly feature. To that end I will run the first few. Hopefully within a couple weeks we will have a format that works and other experts can step in/step up.

For our first lesson, we will try to cover the basics (ala Angie's lesson plan): drupal terminology and what it means, the basic module hooks, good coding style and best practices.

Since this is of high value to all dojo members -- and it's a lesson that could/should be repeated many times as new developers join -- we're also going to try and create good documentation out of this. A primer for new Drupal coders, so to speak.

(image credit: Squidster)