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DRUPAL TRAININGDRUPAL TRAINING

Gorton Studios is able to provide custom Drupal training to your needs. If you need to get a mixed team of strategists, designers, developers, and/or content editors up to speed quickly on building and managing effective websites with Drupal, this 2-day training template is a great place to start.

Building Effective Websites with Drupal Building Effective Websites with Drupal 

Day 1 - The Basics of Building with Drupal

  • Review topics, schedule, and goals to be covered.
  • Background info on Drupal (~.5 hours)
    • Introductions - who we are, what we know, why we're here
    • Brief history - the back-story that shaped the tool
    • Review of Drupal's technology environment
      • Pointers on how to set up a local dev env (XAMPP, 7-Zip, Drupal.tar.gz)
      • Sign into and access class Drupal installations
    • Drupal's other environment
      • Philosophy / Drop Keeps Moving
      • People
    • Jargon: Nodes, Blocks, Modules, Taxonomies, Users, Roles, Comments
  • Building with the basics / Hands on with core Drupal functionality (~2.5 - 3 hours)
    • creating content
    • managing menus
    • managing blocks
    • adding modules
    • configuring modules
    • creating roles
    • managing permissions
    • basic theme configuration 
  • Complex Content - CCK and Views: Hands on with essential Drupal modules (~3 - 3.5+ hours)
    • CCK and Views overview - roles and uses
    • configuration
    • defining content types
    • managing display
    • adding functionality and extending
Wrap up Day 1 concepts, Open Q&A (.5 - 1 hours) 

Day 2 - Doing Drupal Right

Brief review of Day 1, Open Q&A (handle things that came up after class)

  • Managing a Drupal process - plan, design, develop and launch a successful Drupal website (~1 - 1.5 hours)
    • Defining content types, structures, overall philosopy of planning and development
    • Development best-practices (SVN and structured deployment)
    • Design strategies (understanding blocks, views, teasers, etc.)
    • Lifecycle and upgrade considerations
    • The importance of training content editors
  • Hands on with the Theme System and Theming (~3 - 4 hours)
    • Theme engines
    • Components of themes (node, page and block .tpl files)
    • Regions
    • Modifying existing themes
    • Theming overrides
    • Theming from an established base
    • Theming from scratch (or possibly using the Zen theme)
  • Useful / Good Drupal Modules & Recipes (~1.5 - 2 hours)
    • How to evaluate modules
    • Favorites and Standards
      • Infrastructure modules (paths, menus, navigation, etc.)
      • Administration & Workflow
      • Voting
      • Taxonomy
      • Community
      • Events and Dates
      • Maps and Locations
      • Ecommerce
  • Real-life needs and examples (a.k.a. open lab time and/or stump the presenter) (~1 - 1.5 hours)
    • Theming, Building, Managing, etc.

Wrap up all concepts, Open Q&A (.5 - 1 hours)

Notes:

  • We assume 8:30 - 4:30 each day, but exact timing can be adjusted to your needs. 
  • Class sizes are capped at 6 people per instructor
  • Cost is $1000 per instructor per day plus travel expenses. 
  • Drew Gorton is our principal instructor, supplemented/substituted as appropriate per the specifics of your needs.  
  • Depending on class specifics, participants may be required to have a book such as Using Drupal or Pro Drupal Development.

Sound Interesting? Sound Interesting? 

If this sounds like something that would help your organization, contact us and we can talk about your specific needs!