Four weeks of Drupal

There will be 2–3 items posted in this series each week, until it is completed by end of August 2012.

This learning series is intended to take you from Drupal noob into a Drupal developer that can do basic and advanced site building, as well as the basics of module development – and more than the basics in theming. More importantly, you should be able to learn new Drupal skills without getting stuck on small things.

Much of the material in this course consists of links to other learning resources – not least here in the NodeOne learning library – but much of it is also new made for this series.

A quick presentation of the chapters in this course:

1. Introducing Drupal: This introduces Drupal as a concept, and is the only chapter which is non-technical.
2. Installation and more: This chapter contains videos (and some written tips) about how to install Drupal, move Drupal installations, enable modules, and more things that concerns working with the actual code base (and database) of your Drupal site.
3. Content management: This chapter reuses the exercises found in The Boss exercise suite, for practicing your editorial skills with Drupal. The series Learn Drupal 7 with NodeOne is used as tutorials, covering all the important parts of Drupal core. (New videos were recorded for the Boss suite!)
4. Content types, fields and entities: This chapter introduces site building -- using Drupal's online interface to customize the functionality on your site. Existing tutorials (Learn Drupal 7 with NodeOne and the References modules) are complemented with a number of exercises recorded for this course.
5. Views basics: This chapter introduces the arguably most important of the Drupal modules: Views. You will spend a lot of time with this module. There are new exercises recorded for this course, but the tutorials are taken from the Taming the beast series.
6. Intermediate Views: This chapter contains some more tricks of how to make the most out of Views.
7. Advanced Views: In this chapter you will find exercises for using relationships and not least contextual filters in Views. Contextual filters is the key to using Views in a really flexible way.
8. Features: This chapter contains tutorials, but no exercises, for how to use the Features module to export your site configuration into code -- and explains why this is a good thing.
9. Additional Views modules: But we're not done with Views yet! This chapter shows some examples of how to extend the Views module, with data processing (Views Bulk Operations and DraggableViews), presentation (Views Accordion and Views Slideshow) and also to manage data that is not stored in your local database (XML Views and more). There are a few exercises as well.
10. Flag: This chapter reuses the Learn Flag screencast series, as well as some previously published exercises. Flag is a good example of how a small module can become really useful if it integrates with frameworks from other modules (such as Views).
11. Rules: Rules is another important framework module. This chapter reuses the Learn the Rules framework screencast series, and also contains a number of new exercises.
12. Page manager: More important frameworks! Like the previous chapter, this one adds a number of new exercises to an existing tutorial series (Learn Page manager!).
13. Writing a module: This chapter contains an example of how to write a Drupal module. This course won't present all the APIs that Drupal provides, but this chapter gives a (hopefully) pedagogical example of both core and contrib APIs that you can integrate with -- in a way that (hopefully) makes it possible to continue to explore module writing yourself.
14. Introduction to Theming: This chapter covers the basics of Drupal theming pretty well, and shows how to install themes, and then create a sub theme to customize css, page layout, markup of elements, and also how to customize the variables available inside template files. It also contains somewhat less coherent tutorials of more advanced theming topics, such as working with theme functions, theming forms and working with render elements/arrays.
15. Doing Drupal projects: This chapter contains only blog posts -- no videos. The posts are additional texts I wrote for the students in the course, which I think can be useful for the general public as well. The chapter also contains a description of the requirements to pass this course.

Two of the things this course does not cover are multi-lingual sites and content access restrictions.

It is estimated that you will be able to go through this material in four weeks, if you're working at high speed.

Have fun!

There will be 2–3 items posted in this series each week, until it is completed by end of August 2012.