[consulting] Drupal Primer Course

[Darrel O'Pry]

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 21:57 +0200, Adrian Rossouw wrote:
> On 12 Apr 2006, at 12:57 AM, John Sechrest wrote:
> > So given that you have people who are basically literate, what are  
> > the outcomes
> > of the class/courseware?
> >
> > What can they do after the class that they could not do before the  
> > class?
> >
> > Can you make a detailed list/answer to this?
> 
> Man. I'm actually having trouble putting together a detailed answer  
> to this.
> 
> I suppose it would be teaching people how to use the tools available  
> to build
> their own site, with a breakdown of the tools, including the basic  
> knowledge
> of how to assemble them.
> 
> One of the big things I do think however, is teaching people how to  
> use cvs,
> the drupal patch queue and how to find information on drupal.org.  
> Some background
> on the community, and how to be a good member of it, and the benefits  
> of contributing
> as much as possible is also something I'd like to see discussed.
> 
> I would also like to show them how to evaluate modules for their  
> purposes,
> and to know in what ways they can adjust modules if they don't fit  
> exactly.
> 
> Kind of delineate the point where just using what is there and  
> themeing it,
> actually modifying the code, or tossing it all and writing your own  
> lies.
> 
> Modules like views, and cck are hopefully going to make the second and
> third case happen less often, which is why I would like to teach them  
> how
> to use that too (plus having decent documentation on those would be  
> invaluable to all developers)
> 
> Perhaps we should discuss this in IRC and see if we can put together  
> a good
> solid set of goals.
> 
> Whatever the actual goals are, I think angie's course layout is a  
> good deal of the way there.

Maybe this indicates a need for multiple courses. Those who can clear
all of them can call themselves drupal certified engineers ;)...

I imagine.. (in reverse order)

1) Drupal Developers track.
   - fundamental understanding of Drupal's Core API's.
   - understanding using RCS for drupal. cvs/diff/patch/bzr, etc.
   - knowledge of where to find the latest drupal documentation
   - understanding of the community debugging and development process...
     (code is gold, scratch your own itch, etc)
   - understanding of drupal coding standards and practices
     (security, performance, and scalability)

2) Consultant and Deployment track
   - Understanding of Core module capabilities
   - Understanding resource demands of drupal and drupal features.
   - Reasonable familiarity with modules and what they provide.
   - Passing understanding of core apis, and how modules interact with 
     core.
   - Understanding of drupal administration tasks.
   - Views, Workflows, Actions...


3) Drupal Poweruser/Administrator 
   - Understanding of drupal UI's for editing and creating nodes.
   - Understanding Categories...
   - Understanding of using revisions, creating / reverting   
   - Core Drupal Settings and confguration.
   - useful drupal q='s (taxo urls, feed urls, etc)

4) Drupal user (intro course)...
   - Understanding of what drupal is and what a CMS is.
   - Basic drupal workflows (create and edit content)
   - uploading a file...