Drupal Training Day - June 14th - Summary

Around 20 employees stepped away from their work duties to attend the Drupal Global Training Day event on Friday 14th June hosted by Microserve at Armanda House, Bristol. Amongst them were freelancers, students, lecturers and employees in web development agencies interested in site building, theming, back-end coding and project management and eager to learn more about Drupal.

The event started with an introductory talk by Rick Donohoe, who explained the structure of the day, the environment that the attendees would work on (Acquia Dev Desktop) and the goal of the training, which was a general understanding of Drupal's features. Each part of the training included demonstrations and tasks for the attendees to practice what they have been taught, in the context of building a website for an imaginary restaurant.

Talks

The talks and demonstrations lasted approximately 6 hours and were presented in the following order:

  • Content types – Rick Donohoe: the attendees created, whilst watching the demonstration, a recipe content type and then practised their understanding by creating a sauce content type.
  • Blocks – Steve Furley: the structure of blocks were explained, whilst creating a logo block and other blocks for testing. The CKEditor and ctools modules were also enabled and demonstrated in this context.
  • Taxonomy terms – Steve Furley: the use of taxonomy terms in Drupal was analysed whilst creating terms for meats and using them in content types.
  • Menus – Nasia Notta: the attendees were introduced to the structure of menus in Drupal, the way of adding/editing/deleting links/menus and then practised by creating a footer menu with multi-level internal and external links.
  • Users – Nasia Notta: the users, roles and permissions in Drupal were defined, the options when adding/editing/deleting a user were demonstrated and the attendees practised by creating different roles with varying permissions, which allowed them to discover the differences in content access.
  • Views – Mark Pavlitski: the importance of Views in Drupal was pointed out, whilst demonstrating a page view with a list of recipes, practising with the different options for formats, filters, ordering, pagers and contextual filters.
  • Webforms – Rick Donohoe: the Webform module was installed and used to create of a booking form for the restaurant, showcasing the usability of this popular module.
  • Custom Theming – Rick Donohoe: a brief overview of the steps when creating a custom theme in Drupal was discussed, whilst denoting the flexibility and the benefits that custom theming brings in Drupal.

The Microserve team were more than glad to see how well the attendees responded to each presentation. The tutors aimed throughout the day to break down any complexities that Drupal introduces, answering general questions and providing individual assistance where needed.

 

Resolution

The event according to the individual given tasks and the feedback was a success and hopefully made the attendees more eager about Drupal as a CMS and platform. The Microserve team really enjoyed it and is looking forward to another training day.

Furthermore, Microserve provides training packages for an in-depth learning of web development in Drupal. For more information about Drupal training, please visit our Training Service page or get in touch with us via the Contact form.

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