[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

[Gus Austin]

Hi James

This sort of open coursework and curriculum seems relevant to what is
proposed/discussed here - http://drupal.org/node/489392

Currently there's an effort to develop a proof of concept - if it seems
complimentary, possibly you'd be interested in helping drive this forward?

Cheers
Gus

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 11:20 AM, James Benstead
<james.benstead at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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