Welcome to Hello Drupal! the course for aspirant Drupalistas

From its humble beginnings as news site for Dries Buytaert's friends at university, Drupal has grown into arguably the most flexible and extendable Open Source CMS available. 

Course Goals and objectives

The course is made up of four learning sessions taking place over two weeks. Course activities are both hands on and forum related. 

Session 1: Resistance is futile!

  • Live Session: Tuesday Dec 5th. See schedule page for your local timezone.
  • Create a drupal site on Drupal Gardens
  • Understand where Drupal comes from and what makes it special

Session 2: Don't hack Core!

  • Configure a Drupal contributed module. 
  • Understand why Drupal developers "don't hack core"

Session 3: Thinking like Drupal

  • Live Session: Tuesday Dec 13th. See schedule page for your local timezone.
  • Create your own custom content type in Drupal
  • Understand the structure of Drupal as related to the development methodology

Session 4: Themes and Modules

  • Gain a clear understanding of how contributed themes and modules add value to Drupal core
  • Search for and evaluate the "health" of a module that you require
  • Understand who creates and maintains modules and how to assist in making them better

How is the course structured?

The course is instructor lead but you can work in  your own time. There are deadlines for each task and you are given ample time to compelte them. The course activities are designed to completed in less than an hour per day. 

What we require of you

  • Commitment and enthusiastic participation. Courses of this nature are only as good as the participants interaction. 
  • To keep things on track there are soft deadlines for activities. 
  • There are no marks, assessments or tests, whew!
  • As most of the work involves commuication and discussion all the normal online rules about respect and politness apply.

Your facilitators

Patrick Frickel - I've had a 20 year romance with the Internet, sad but true. And like most relationships there have been the ups and downs. One of the biggest highlights has been Linux and Open Source. I've worked with Drupal since version 5 mostly as an business analyst and project manager but had my fair share of Drupal configuration. I look forward to meeting you all on the course.  

Heather James - For me, Drupal was always a means to an end. I started using Drupal because it was "free", but enjoyed the community and support so much. Now, I work at Acquia developing learning materials for our training program. I'm an experienced trainer and I'm always curious about how we learn at all stages of our lives, I'm keen to find out how best to facilitate learning.