[development] Proposal: Drupal University

[James Benstead]

Thanks for the comments.

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.

Again, anyone got any more thoughts on this?
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2009/12/28 Yani <akayani at aapt.net.au>

> http://www.drupalbook.com/
>
> That looks like a good one. I'll make that my first D7 book.
>
> Yani
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:
> development-bounces at drupal.org]
> On Behalf Of Andrew Schulman
> Sent: Monday, 28 December 2009 7:37 PM
> To: development at drupal.org
> Subject: Re: [development] Proposal: Drupal University
>
> > Shell out some cash on books by Matt Butcher / Packit Publishing.
>
> The Packit books are fine as far as they go, but are usually short and
> basic.
> For a detailed look at Drupal's big picture, I highly recommend Pro Drupal
> Development, 2nd ed. by John VanDyk.  2nd ed. is for D6, but I see that a
> 3rd
> edition for D7 is due out in April.
>
>
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