- Training A: Drupal Site Building — Part 1 : Basics
- Training B: Drupal Site Building — Part 2 : Advanced
- Training C: Drupal Development — Part 1 : Basics
- Training D: Drupal Development — Part 2 : Advanced
Drupal is a very powerful tool to build website without the need to code a single line of code. The aim of sessions A and B will be to show the audience all that can be achieved by installing, configuring and using plug and play modules. At the end of training A, the student will be able to create a simple showcase website with both static and dynamic content. In training B, we will tackle more complex solutions that allow to achieve powerful features in order to create rich & intelligent software inside a website without writing any line of code.
The big advantage of Drupal is that whenever you need to do something, there are 99% chances that what you need already exists as a module. So you can actually build stuff that would have taken weeks to do in now just a few hours... But this comes with a price! Because of that, you get used to building things quickly. But what happens when what the module gives you is not 100% what your client wants? What happens when you just need to tweak a little something? Well, there are two scenarios: either you know Drupal coding, or you don't. Knowing programming or PHP will not save you here...
Option 1: you don't know the Drupal way of doing things. In that case, you will feel like tearing your hair appart. You will lose a considerable amount of time actually trying to achieve things that are usually so simple to do in regular programming that it will drive you nuts and you won't be able to explain your client why you cannot do it faster. And because you lack time, you will probably chose the dirty way and create a non-stable code, for which you will pay during all the project's life.
Option 2: you know how Drupal coding works and where and how you should write your custom code. A few hours later, you're done.
Chosing to learn Drupal on the fly along with a project is the worse decision one can make. The aim of training sessions C & D is to teach you the Drupal way of adding custom behavior or intelligence to existing modules and also to create your own modules. In training C we will see how to add custom code to existing modules while training D will be more about creating full featured modules. If you are willing to bet that your Drupal project will not need any custom code, you might as well cut off your hand right now!
Note : Drupal Theming will be handled troughout all four training courses. Drupal theming can be achieved in multiple ways, all of which will be introduced in their respective level of complexity. So for example, simple non-technical theming techniques will be introduced in training A, while powerful code-based techniques will be seen in development sessions...