[consulting] Drupal Primer Course

[Angela Byron]

> Does anyone have any input on this ? What should we be teaching people
> getting into drupal?

Awesome initiative.

Here's how I would do break it down:

Lesson 1: Overview
- What is Drupal?
- How can Drupal help me build sites faster?
- Showcase some example sites
- Take them on a tour of Drupal.org; where the handbook is, where the module
downloads are, where the issue queues for those modules are, API Documentation,
IRC, what the various support options are, etc.

Lesson 2: Drupal Vocabulary
- What is a Node?
- What is Taxonomy?
- What is a Hook?
- What is a Theme/Theme Engine?
- What is <fill in some other term that gives newbies problems>

Lesson 3: Building a Basic Brochureware Site
- How to install Drupal
- How to configure Drupal
- How to do basic theming
- Exercise: Give students a set of requirements, perhaps similar to
http://drupal.org/node/31896, and have them dink around in Drupal and figure out
how to do it.

Lesson 4: Theming Exposed
- In-depth overview of theming system
- Discuss variables available on pages
- Using phptemplate.php
- Discuss how to override theme functions
- Defining your own Regions

Lesson 5: Modules
- In-depth overview of hook system
- In-depth overview of forms API
- In-depth overview of menu system
- In-depth overview of ???
- Might also need to teach some CVS/patch stuff here; I was fluent in
PHP/SQL/HTML/CSS but Drupal was the first time I ever used CVS/patching.

Lesson 6: More Modules
- Analyze existing module: Story
- Exercise: Add a few fields and maybe some hook_nodeapi and other stuff to
story module (basically, showing how to extend an existing module, which is a
common use case)
- Basically, follow Karoly's outline here.

Final "Capstone" project:
- Students are to gather up a set of requirements for a site they want to build;
for example, an e-commerce site, an online community, etc.
- Students must research existing modules and experiment and choose from them
ones which will help
- Students must also mockup a design in Photoshop or what have you, and
implement it using theming
- Students must also create at least one custom module which adds functionality
in some way that is missing from existing ones (and maybe collate the best of
these for contribution back to CVS?).

Just an idea. I'm sure there's a lot missing, but that's my 5 minute take. And
no, this would not be a one day course. :P Could maybe be covered in 3 very
intense days, though, if they were given extra time to turn in the final project.

-Angie