Workshops

Upcoming workshops

Be sure to check out our upcoming workshops!

 

Administrative Workshops

Drupal for Content Providers

Overview: This half-day workshop provides detailed instruction for those who contribute, author and alter the content of Drupal web sites. The course will help you build the skills needed to update, maintain, review, add, and delete text, photos, links and attachments. The course will also present needed vocabulary and a general overview of the technology to build the confidence and understanding of Drupal to enable productive communications with site administrators and the technical team.

Objective: Learn to add, delete, and alter content on a Drupal site.

Outline:

  • What is Drupal? (the software, the community)
  • Drupal Vocabulary
  • Getting comfortable with the Administrative Area
  • Structured versus "free-form" content.
  • Creating content.
  • Working with WYSIWYG editors.
  • Authoring for responsive sites

Audience:  Authors, clerical/data entry staff.

Drupal for Content Administrators

Overview: This full day training provides comprehensive, detailed instruction for those who are responsible for managing users and content of Drupal sites.  It is a recommended add-on to Drupal for Content Providers, and provides all the need-to-knows for authors and site administrators to be confident and comfortable working independently and communicating with developers on needs and issues. Participants will learn to review, filter, delete and publish content to web sites, as well as how to manage users with  varying roles and permissions. The course also provides an overview of the technology and vocabulary to ensure clear and productive communication with the development team.

Objective: Gain the requisite skills and build confidence to manage and administer content and authors for web sites.

Beginner

The Drupal community provides a plethora of online learning tutorials, screencasts, and blog posts to help just about anyone learn the basics of Drupal site-building and development. With so many learning resources available, it can be difficult to determine which are the best solutions to use and which are bad habits to avoid. In this workshop, you'll be taken on a journey of building portions of a Drupal site using commonly-implemented best practices.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Site administrators, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:
  • A local development environment (Acquia Dev Desktop or similar).
  • Drush (included with Acquia Dev Desktop) installed locally.
  • Git installed locally.
  • Basic knowledge of the Drupal administration area.

This full day course covers the basics of Drupal, helps to give you the information you need to decide if Drupal is right for you, and teaches you all the steps to installing, getting up to speed, and learning the basics you need to know.
Participants need to bring a wifi enabled laptop to the session.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers
Prerequisites:

None - just a interest in learning about Drupal!
You must bring a wifi enabled laptop to class.

We spend time during most of our courses talking about the many ways you can interact with the Drupal community. It is often said that organizations who don't become involved with the community are only getting half of the Drupal experience. We'll help you discover how to choose modules, evaluate developers, find documentation, and get connected with your local community.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

No experience required.

Along with HTML and CSS, JavaScript is one of the fundamental client-side building blocks of modern, interactive web sites. This workshop will provide a solid introduction to this scripting language. Students will learn about JavaScript syntax, rules, common uses, and best practices. jQuery is a popular JavaScript library that makes using JavaScript easier, faster, more efficient, and often more powerful. Students will learn the basics of jQuery, what jQuery plugins are, and how to leverage jQuery on web sites.

Intended audience: Developers, Themers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

Students should be comfortable with modern HTML and CSS. To participate in the in-class exercises, students should have a modern laptop with one (or both) of the following:

Blue Collar Views will teach students how to quickly and effectively leverage one of the most popular contributed modules. Views is used by more than 1,000,000 sites around the globe, so being able to wield its awesome power is a necessary skill for site builders of all levels. This course will not only teach the basics of Views, but will also teach students how to quickly use what they learned on real-world sites.

Intended audience: Newbies
Prerequisites:

A good foundational knowledge of core Drupal including content types and fields, taxonomy, and user profiles.

This two- or three-hour webinar will focus on the navigation and menu design for responsive websites. Various examples will be used to demonstrate how navigation elements can be made responsive using different techniques.

Intended audience: Newbies, Themers, Bloggers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

Participants should have a base knowledge of responsive website design (including fluid grids and media queries).

This full-day course covers the building blocks of Drupal and what makes up a web site, the types of content and how to best add, delete and edit content.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers
Prerequisites:

Basic knowledge about what Drupal is and to have a working copy of Drupal installed.

This two- or three-hour webinar will focus on the fundamentals of responsive design including why is it important, how it can be leveraged on existing sites, how new sites can be designed with responsiveness in mind, and how CSS media queries are used to make it all happen.

Intended audience: Newbies, Themers, Bloggers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

A basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.

This full-day workshop introduces the fundamental concepts of theming a Drupal site. Starting with the anatomy of a Drupal theme before moving on to creating subthemes, working with template files, and writing CSS, this workshop is designed to get students oriented with Drupal theming.

Intended audience: Newbies, Themers, Graphic designers, Bloggers
Prerequisites:

The ability to administer content, comments, and user on a Drupal site.

The Drupal Career Starter Program is 12 weeks of intensive classroom, lab work and independent hands-on projects designed for people with a knack for IT that are seeking a quick start and a clear direction toward new, stable careers in open source technology. Our approach compresses the Drupal learning curve by immersing students in learning and using Drupal and its associated technologies, providing guidance and resources, as well as requiring early engagement in the community.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

Any previous practical information technology, web development, or programming experience.

HTML and CSS are the foundation of the modern web. This workshop teaches the basic principles of modern HTML and CSS, including introductions into HTML5 and CSS3.

In the first half of the workshop students will learn the fundamentals of HTML tags, elements, and attributes, with a focus on best practices and the underlying concept of semantic markup. The material is presented as a series of more than 10 examples, each one increasing the complexity and/or introducing new topics.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

A strong interest into learning the fundamental display mechanisms for modern web sites.

A great web site is just one aspect of a solid online presence for your organization. To maximize your online reach, it’s important to leverage the growing relevance of social media outlets so you can reach people where they're spending their time. This workshop will demonstrate how to create and manage your organization’s presence on several popular social media platforms. In addition, it will also demonstrate how to save time and plan ahead to automatically push content from your web site to your social media accounts.

Intended audience: Newbies, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

Familiarity with social media.

As a training partner of Acquia, one of leading Drupal firms in the world, we are pleased to offer Acquia's "Drupal in a Day" training course.

Intended audience: Newbies, Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

None - just a interest in learning about Drupal!

Intermediate

Module development for Drupal is more powerful than ever. Object-orientation, the maturity of Drupal's various APIs, modern Drupal's new underlying Symfony (and other) components, and the emergence of "drush generate" commands means that developing for modern Drupal requires some new knowledge for existing (pre Drupal 8) Drupal developers. This workshop is designed to introduce existing Drupal developers as well as (non-Drupal) PHP developers to some of the techniques and concepts for modern Drupal module development.

Intended audience: Developers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:
  • Some experience with PHP.
  • Some familiarity with object-oriented concepts.
  • Experience working in the command-line interface.
  • Experience working in a local *AMP development environment.
  • Experience with a code editor.
  • Existing knowledge of Drupal APIs is helpful, but not necessary.
  • An up-and-running local *AMP stack with a fresh Drupal 10 install.

Theming in Drupal 8 has taken a giant leap forward, this workshop will provide students with a solid foundation of knowledge to build upon. The inclusion of the Twig template engine in Drupal 8 means that experienced Drupal 7 themers will have to gain new skills in order to be productive in Drupal 8. Luckily, the changes made to Drupal 8's theme system will result in more streamlined and secure themes.

Intended audience: Developers, Themers, Graphic designers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:
  • Working knowledge of HTML and CSS.
  • Some experience with PHP.
  • Experience working in the command-line interface.
  • Experience working in a local *AMP development environment.
  • Experience with a code editor.
  • Existing knowledge of Drupal 7 theming is helpful, but not necessary.
  • An up-and-running local *AMP stack with a fresh Drupal 8 install.

Almost anyone with a bit of Drupal knowledge can build a functional Drupal site these days, but what happens when it's time to get the last 5 years of your organization's content into that snazzy new site? More often than not, the solution involves hiring outside help or migrating content manually (ugh). Fortunately, the Drupal community has written some amazing tools to assist with content migration, and this workshop will demonstrate how to utilize them.

Intended audience: Developers, Hobbyists
Prerequisites:

Participants should have a good base knowledge of Drupal fundamentals for the Feeds migration portion of the workshop. The Migration module examples will involve a generous amount of object-oriented PHP code.

For students that want to follow along:

Feeds portion of the workshop

  1. Have a local copy of Drupal up-and-running on your machine (via Acquia Dev Desktop or similar).
  2. Have the Feeds, Feeds Tamper, Views Bulk Operations, and Administration Views modules installed and enabled on your local site.
  3. The instructor will also provide sample content to migrate at the time of the class.

Migrate portion of the workshop

  1. Have a local copy of Drupal up-and-running on your machine (via Acquia Dev Desktop or similar).
  2. Have the Migrate module installed and enabled (including the "Migrate UI" module - part of the main "Migrate module") on your local site.
  3. Have the BBCode and Redirect modules installed and enabled on your local site.
  4. Have a code editor that you're comfortable with installed on your local machine.
  5. Have a MySql administration tool up-and-running on your local machine (phpMyAdmin or similar).
  6. (optional) have Drush up-and-running on your local machine.
  7. The instructor will provide sample content to migrate at the time of the class.

Drupal-to-Drupal Migration portion of the workshop

  1. Have a local copy of Drupal up-and-running on your machine (via Acquia Dev Desktop or similar).
  2. Have the Migrate and Drupal-to-Drupal Migration modules installed and enabled (including the "Migrate UI" module (part of the main "Migrate module") on your local site.
  3. Have a code editor that you're comfortable with installed on your local machine.
  4. Have a MySql administration tool up-and-running on your local machine (phpMyAdmin or similar).
  5. (optional) have Drush up-and-running on your local machine.
  6. The instructor will provide sample content to migrate at the time of the class.

Example files for this workshop can be found here, but will only be available immediately prior to, and during an active workshop.

Long before the birth of the Internet, Bell Labs gave UNIX to the world. Now a majority of the world's websites use this system and its cousin, Linux, to host sites and enable developers to work more efficiently with a time-tested and often-dreaded tool: the command line.

Intended audience: Developers, Themers, Site administrators, Site managers
Prerequisites:

Advanced computer skills, some knowledge of programming is helpful, basic Drupal site administration.

This day-long course dives into three of the most widely-used modules that are used to display a site's content: Views, Context, and Panels. Understanding how these modules work (and work together) is key to building a site that delivers content to the right place at the right time in the right format.

Intended audience: Developers, Themers, Site administrators, Site managers, Bloggers
Prerequisites:

The ability to add/edit/delete content/comments/users from a Drupal site.

The Git version control system can sometimes be a little intimidating for new users -- until you learn just a little bit about what is under the hood, then the full power of this modern version control system is fully revealed. In this full-day workshop, we'll start off by using Tinkertoys to demonstrate the basic commands of Git (including merge and rebase). From there we’ll move on to dealing with remote repositories, dealing with conflicts, and working with patches.

Intended audience: Developers
Prerequisites:

All students should have a working local copy of the git version control system on their computer (Windows: http://help.github.com/win-set-up-git/, Mac OS X: http://git-scm.com/). It is recommended (but not required) that students be familiar with the concepts of version control systems.

This two- or three-hour webinar will cover the basics of Drupal's Rules module, and how it can add custom functionality to a Drupal site without writing any code. In addition to covering the fundamentals of event-condition-action Rules, we'll dive into an in-depth example that utilizes all aspects of the module.

Intended audience: Developers, Site administrators
Prerequisites:

A basic knowledge of Drupal fundamentals including content types, taxonomy and users.

This course focuses on creating a new theme from a base theme, including theming content displays and Views output.

Intended audience: Developers, Themers, Graphic designers
Prerequisites:

Knowledge of CSS, XHTML, PHP, and Drupal theme anatomy.

Finding that existing Drupal modules don't quite meet all the requirements when developing a web site? If so, you're probably ready to learn how to extend Drupal's functionality with some custom modules. In this course, we cover the basics of writing custom functionality the "Drupal way". You will learn how to leverage Drupal's powerful "hook" system as well as good coding practices that will help make your modules easier to understand, upgrade, and maintain.

Intended audience: Developers
Prerequisites:

XHTML, PHP, some JavaScript/jQuery is helpful, ability to administer a Drupal site

This workshop will focus on building a magazine-style web site that pulls in syndicated content and gives editors and users the ability to add ratings and comments. The content is then published in various dynamic layouts based on editor and user input.

Intended audience: Developers, Site administrators
Prerequisites:

Some knowledge of Views, CCK, Taxonomy, Panels.

This workshop will demonstrate various strategies that will allow you to add and configure advanced features to your site via the administration area.

Intended audience: Developers, Site administrators, Site managers
Prerequisites:

Basic Drupal knowledge, comfortable in the admin area.

Ninja

"Work smarter, not harder". Do you find yourself hitting the ceiling with Drupal's administration tools? Do your Editors and Clients complain about the difficulty of Drupal, or are they prone to make mistakes? Do you need advanced permissions, with multi-level approval? Per-department, per-user, or worse? Drupal has been helping people solve these problems for years now, and new modules are making it more powerful all the time.

Intended audience: Developers, Site administrators, Site managers
Prerequisites:

6-12 monts of Drupal Administration, advanced knowledge of CCK and Views, some PHP skills, some module development.

If you have theming down and want to learn how to override theme functions and theme CCK and Views output, this is the full-day course for you.

Intended audience: Developers, Themers, Graphic designers
Prerequisites:

A working knowledge of CSS, XHTML, PHP, and Drupal theme anatomy.