This post originally ran on the ADCI blog, and has been reposted with their permission.

On August 30th ADCI Solutions and Omsk Drupal community participated in a worldwide event and organized the first Drupal Global Training Day.

This unique program is being conducted around the world since 2012. Every quarter training activities take place in different countries and cities in a single day. The Drupal Association promotes Drupal Global Training Days where various organizations across the globe host free events to bring people into the Drupal community.

Simultaneously with us 36 companies in Rome, London, Sydney, Madrid, Milan, Chicago, New York, Pakistan, India, and other far-away places conducted trainings for Drupal beginners.

Drupal is an advanced platform with open source software, which is developing dynamically, because about six hundred of thousands of developers around the world are constantly working on the project. Drupal is used for websites of any complexity: from blogs to public and government portals. Sites of the White House, The Beatles, Aeroflot, MTV, Forbes, GEO are working on Drupal.

Learning about Drupal

More than forty people came to get and share knowledge, among them were students, programmers, content managers, experienced developers and newbies who are at their start on the Drupal-way. The training program was built so that students first learned what Drupal is, where it comes from and who it is developed by, what its characteristics are, what open source technology and drupal community are. Then followed a report about advantages and disadvantages of Drupal, for what types of projects it is most effective to use.

During the coffee break, we gave T-shirts with the logo of the Omsk Drupal community to the wiiners of our competitions and made a group photo.

Then we moved on to the practical part. Audience took the basic steps of creating a site. Everybody learned how the Drupal looks and what opportunities it gives out of the box. Without writing a single line of code we made a news site with flexible content filters and sponsors' logos in the footer. Drupal allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Its modular architecture allows you to put together the components you need to build practically any site. For those who have a general idea of ​​how it works, but have no practical experience, the course was an excellent start.

The day ended with a report on theming. Students learned basic rules that should be followed in order that work with the theme was simple and clear, got aquainted with popular themes and learned how to create their own theme effortlessly.

A Community of Amazing People

As it was the first meeting in the new format of the training, we asked the guests to fill out a short feedback questionnaire. We wanted to know what people are interested in, and what they would like to hear next time. Thanks to the participants, we are pleased to see you. Everyone appreciated the initiative of free educational software. Most noted that they came to learn how to work with Drupal, and this training helped them to make the first step. We were pleased to see the live chat during the break, when the speakers are willing to explain something to beginners with a cup of coffee.

Of course, in the technical sense, Drupal is a CMS/CMF, but for thousands of people it is much more. This community is full of amazing people who are open to dialogue and able to inspire. Last year, the Drupal Association registered 2765 Drupal events. Glad that this year we will fill up this number.