[consulting] Drupal Primer Course

[Adrian Rossouw]

Hey guys.

Kieran suggested I post to this list about my plans.

South Africa is still stuck in Web 0.8, with people still selling  
front-page designed sites for thousands of dollars.

Due to the bad exchange rate, and the general distrust of  
international outsourcing,
and the backwards state of our web industry,  local clients are  
completely unwilling
to pay people overseas to do any development, and the lack of  
(quality?) Drupal developers
makes the Drupal industry here stillborn.

I have several friends who are now doing freelance development, who are
either interested in, or have started doing Drupal development here  
in South Africa.
All of these people I introduced / got interested in doing Drupal,  
and most of them
just need a short introduction to get them up to speed.

So in the interest of getting my friends into the fold and improving  
the community,
I have decided I want to run a short primer course on Drupal, for people
who already know php / web development.

At first I was planning to do it in an unofficial nature, but I  
realised that it would make
more sense to actually build some courseware / tutorial documentation  
out of this
process, and it would make teaching the subject far easier too.

I have contacted my friend who is an RHCE /ICDL trainer, and has  
written courseware
for several other courses. He has agreed to help me / us write the  
courseware and format
the course well.

I have also got the use of a training lab to teach the course in. And  
although I only have about
4 people interested in doing the course, I would consider going up to  
a max of 8 people.

What I would like to do, is build some courseware to put on  
Drupal.org, and coordinate
with other people who would be interested in doing drupal training /  
putting together
a primer course to train up their own developers.

The tentative dates I have scheduled for the course is 19 to 23 June  
2006, or 22 to 26 June 2006.
I think that's more than enough time to get the necessary  
documentation together. A lot of this
will be presenting the information already in the handbook in a  
structured manner, with exercises
and the like.

Remember, the goal is not to mint new programmers. The turning people  
who already know
PHP / XHTML / CSS into Drupal developers.

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

--
Adrian Rossouw
Drupal developer and Bryght Guy
http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com