Course Length: 4 days

Course Description: Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.

Audience: Application and web developers, system administrators responsible for maintaining a Drupal installation.

Prerequisites: None

Course Agenda

Module 1
This topic answers the main "need to know" questions about Drupal: what's Drupal, who's using it, why are they using it, and how does it 'work'? It also provides some historical context to Drupal, introduces essential terminology, and other introductory information regarding content management systems.

Module 2
Ths topic gets you up to speed on how to install Drupal, as well as how to do upgrades down the road. This section also includes information regarding initial configuration and security settings, including users and roles and content security settings.

Module 3
This hands-on topic hits the ground running, and will show you how to use Drupal's core functionality, as well as a few contributed modules, in order to build a basic business website. By the end of this topic, you should feel comfortable in Drupal's administrative section, and also know how to create basic content through a WYSIWYG interface with the FCKeditor and IMCE modules. We'll also discuss Drupal modules that can help handle inevitable abuse, including Mollom.

Module 4
This topic introduces the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules by walking through the construction of a community website. By the end of this topic, you'll understand how to create custom content types and add form fields.

Module 5
This topic provides overview information about Drupal's theming system, and some basic tricks you can use to override the look and feel of Drupal. By the time you finish this topic, you can start modifying template files and start to give Drupal your own look and feel!


Module 6
Evaluating modules is often the biggest hurdle to building a Drupal site. This section is a breakdown of strategies and tips for figuring out which module will work for your site.

Module 7
In this wrap-up module, we discuss the important topics of security, hosting providers, professional management of Drupal and performance tuning the underlying mySQL database.