[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

[Ariane Khachatourians]

Hi James -

Are you thinking more specifically like online tutorials, something like
what they have at http://w3schools.com/ ?

I do have to say, I think using the term "University" is probably not going
to sit quite right, but you could always make it a play on that like UDrupal
or Drupalversity or something...

Overall, I think it would be useful to have some kind of more structured
"courses" online. That would also relieve some pressure off the handbook to
fill every how-to need that exists.  But the IA for it would really have to
be well thought out so that it's not just duplicating efforts.

Also, be sure you have a large enough interested group to actually sustain
that amount of documentation, as it would be quite significant.  I'd highly
suggest that you post this to the Curriculum and Training g.d.o group
http://groups.drupal.org/curriculum so that others who would be interested
in maintaining such a thing will catch wind of it.  (It's one of these
situations where it's unfortunate that we can't post to the docs group and
cross-post the discussion there.)

One question to discuss though: would it necessarily be better to have this
sort of content divided from the rest of the handbook? Or would it be
useful/feasible for each section to contain tutorials? For instance, the
theming section to have as a top level section "Tutorials" and then a list
of various ones.

Interesting ideas...

Ariane





On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 8:20 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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