[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

[James Benstead]

I've been errantly discussing the idea of setting up a structured set of
Drupal courses on the dev list for a little while. Hopefully my most recent
post to their will make sense out of context. Thoughts?

 Drupal Dojo is great, when it's running - but it does seem to me that it
> lacks a little organisation. What I am suggesting doesn't necessarily need
> to be new documentation, per se, but instead *the organisation of existing
> documentation under a useful structure*.
>
> Perhaps calling it Drupal University is a bit misleading as I don't forsee
> there being any formal assessment or accreditation, but there would be
> structured courses to work through. For example, "Drupal 101: Beginning
> Drupal" which could teach complete newbies how to set up a core installation
> on a local or remote server; or "Drupal 201: Basic Theming" which could
> explain how .tpl.php files worked and how CSS works in Drupal.
>
> The Packt books are great, but they are short and sweet and they don't
> offer an overall structure. Pro Drupal Development is superb and offers a
> great structure, but it has its limitations: in short, *it's a book*.
> First off, you have to buy it, for real money. I have no problem with people
> making money out of open source software (especially when their work is as
> brilliant as in the case of PDD), but I do think there should be a free,
> "open source" alternative. If for no other reason, the cover price of PDD is
> huge for developers in 2nd or 3rd world countries (i.e., the majority of the
> population of the planet) and they should have an alternative. Secondly, you
> can't interact with a book: having a structured set of web resources would
> mean people could comment on and discuss the resources, kind of like
> students do on a real university campus.
>
> I suppose the resource that gets closest to what I'm thinking is the Drupal
> Cookbook - this could be Drupal 101. It fits my proposal because it doesn't
> provide new documentation, but just organises what's already out there. But
> more importantly, it answers the question, "I am at stage X in learning
> Drupal, what should I do next?". Granted, it answers the simplest version of
> this question, and for more advanced developers the answer well may be
> multi-faceted - "if you want to specialise in X, go and learn Y" - but it
> does crystallise what I'm proposing.
>

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