Hi James <br><br>This sort of open coursework and curriculum seems relevant to what is proposed/discussed here - <a href="http://drupal.org/node/489392">http://drupal.org/node/489392</a><br><br>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?<br>
<br>Cheers<br>Gus <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 11:20 AM, James Benstead <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:james.benstead@gmail.com">james.benstead@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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?<div><br></div>
<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(68, 68, 68);"><div>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 <b>the organisation of existing documentation under a useful structure</b>.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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, <b>it's a book</b>. 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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
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