[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

[James Benstead]

Interesting - having the project type would certainly foramlise the "course"
concept, but I'm struggling a little to see why something as heavy as CVS
would be useful - wouldn't a standard Mediawiki type thing with a page,
version history and a talk page be enough? Or am I missing something?

2009/12/28 Gus Austin <gusaus at gmail.com>

> Hi James
>
> This sort of open coursework and curriculum seems relevant to what is
> proposed/discussed here - http://drupal.org/node/489392
>
> 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?
>
> Cheers
> Gus
>
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 11:20 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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>>
>>
>> --
>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
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>>
>
>
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
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