Students will receive a comprehensive overview of how to build in Drupal, including configuration, coding, and theming with a high level of detail.
This is a three-part workshop in Drupal development, site-building, and theming.Beginning with the fundamental concepts of Drupal, students will then learn how to implement these concepts, as well as Drupal best practices, performance tuning, and mobile development. After completing all three sections, students will have full working knowledge of how to build, configure, develop, and theme Drupal websites, plus an understanding of how to build web applications using the Drupal framework.
Takeaways- Learn how to completely build a site in Drupal.
- Understand how modules work and how to build a custom module.
- Discover the power of the views system and how to use it.
- Find out about theming in Drupal, including templates, variable processing, CSS, and Javascript.
- Learn about Drupal development and deployment best practices, including creating and using features.
- Find out about many advanced concepts in Drupal not readily evident.
Session I - Introduction: Content, Configuration & Modules
- Drupal development philosophy, overview of site-building and development, Drupal workflow, how to get started.
- Using Drupal APIs, Drupal Bootstrap, Drupal core, Drupal PHP internals: what's going on “under the hood”.
- Site building in Drupal, Working with content, How Drupal configuration works, Input filters & formats, Coding in Drupal. Using Drupal Features. Using Drupal “recipes.”
- Drupal's hook system, working with modules, the most useful modules and how to configure them.
Session II - Development and Theming (including views configuration & building custom modules)
- How to build complex queries and display outputs with Drupal views, incl. Plugins, handlers, contextual filters and query alter hooks. Using Panels for dynamic layouts & displays.
- How to write your own custom Drupal module, how modules 'hook' into http request, advanced module development techniques.
- Creating your own theme using the Drupal theme layer, how to use php template theming engine, theme hooks & theme functions, working with render arrays. When to use a base theme. Adaptive and Responsive Theming.
- How Javascript works in Drupal, aggregation, 2-way data binding & using jQuery.
Session III - Advanced Development (including features, forms, fields, entities & performance tuning)
- Data modeling and using Field API to build custom entities in Drupal, entity references & field handlers.
- Building and altering forms in Drupal, Using Form API (aka FAPI); form states, dynamic form elements, form altering, validation, submit handlers & ajax forms.
- Using Drush & Features to speed up your development workflow. What good is an awesome site if it doesn't perform well? How to make your Drupal site blazingly fast.
- Combing all the concepts covered in this 3 day course so that it all makes sense. You will learn not just how to do everything covered, but also understand why it works the way it does.
Prerequisites and preparationLaptop with Drupal running locally or in a cloud.
If you do not have Drupal set up on your laptop and would like assistance, please plan on arriving one hour early on the first day of class for a walk-through.
School Notes:
For students enrolling in 12 week part time and immersive classes, it is not recommended that you book more than one class simultaneously.