Are you ready to start your Drupal journey?

Let's begin by questioning the quality of this training material. How did it get started and is this what I need?

It all started with Acquia Drupal's plan to certify Drupal Developers. Their inniciative sparked a series of conversations resulting in tons of great ideas. We extracted the best ones and used them to prepare our training.

Drupal Latin America follows the ADDIE instructional model which consists of the following five stages:

• Analyze - Analyze learner characteristics and tasks to be learned.
• Design - Develop learning objectives and choose an instructional approach.
• Develop - Create instructional or training materials.
• Implement - Deliver or distribute the instructional materials.
• Evaluate - Make sure the materials achieved the desired goals.

Before starting every training effort, we review each one of the previous steps and adjust our curricula to match your needs. Depending on your needs, we use our in-house materials or provide you with a list of third-party training material you can acquire.

Where am I and where do I need to start?

You need to know your abilities and limitations. Which skills do you already master and which ones do you need to pickup in order to escalate positions in the Drupal world? Read the following list and pick the role that you think fits you best:

• Drupal User: Can log in and post content as instructed.
• Drupal User + Content Administrator: Can create users, monitor content, moderate users, moderate taxonomy, fix formatting issues
• Drupal Backend Administrator: Can create CCK types, simple Views, panels, set up taxonomy and other administrative tasks, can search documentation and access resources on d.o (Drupal dot Org)
• Drupal Backend Integrator: Can install Drupal following best practice, can configure a functioning site using contributed modules, can assess reliability and security issues of contributed modules and themes.
• Drupal Graphic Designer: Can install themes, subthemes and create a theme based on graphic templates. Can cut a PSD mockup and turn it into a CSS + HTML template.
• Drupal Theme Developer: Can install themes, subthemes, make full use of Drupal theme engine, write enough PHP code to support theme logic, has sufficient knowledge of CSS and HTML principles
• Drupal Code Developer: Can develop modules using Drupal API. Can write basic code in several languages and advanced code in as many of the following: PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, SQL).

Drupal Learning Tracks:

There are at least seven clearly identifiable learning tracks in the Drupal world. Knowing your audience distribution is important as it will allow us to focus on the tracks that fit your immediate training needs.

• Project Planning and Management.
  Learn about requirement gathering. How to write a Drupal based functional specification document. How to asses times for tasks and break up the backlog accurately. Approaches to running Virtual Teams. Ongoing monitoring of the work done/project management best practices. Waterfall vs Agile and when to use which one.
   
• Coding and development.
  Learn the latest techniques in site development. Simpletests, coding practices, scalability, deployment.
  Create a foundation for development and deployment of Drupal sites.
  Rapidly create a site with a Drupal specific workflow or design pattern using installation profiles.
  You will learn to build websites without coding (Drupal as a product for end users) or use Drupal as a platform to give your web development project a head start.
   
• Information Architecture.
  Information architecture involves identifying the organizational relationships between the various content and functionality of the site, categorizing content, defining labels (names) and navigation systems, and enough interface design to demonstrate how data will be presented.
  Topics covered: User roles and permissions, workflows, taxonomy structure, primary menu items, blocks, CCK node types and fields, user profile fields, views, panels, third party integration, infrastructure, testing and site deployment.
   
• Infrastructure.
  This track contains advanced lessons for System Administrators and CTOs.
  We will cover: How to build a healthy dev environment and place it under version control.
  Scaling Drupal: performance and scalability (server/database optimization and distribution)
  Server virtualization and virtual services ec2, s3 (a.k.a. the cloud)
   
• Testing and Site Deployment.
  Testing: Unit testing, black and white box testing
  Quality Assurance: following/implementing process, procedures and standards.
  Development Workflow: Getting from code to production.
  Development environment and deployment process: including the use of version control for deployments and highlighting the importance of the multiple environments (development -> staging -> production).
   
• Design and Usability.
  This track is focused on the site builders, themers and those interested in delivering a killer user experience both for Drupal itself and their client sites. Written and delivered using terms that will resound well with graphic artists and creatives.
   
• Business, Marketing, and Community.
  Learn how to build showcases and case studies. Pick up the art of sparking industry discussions. Grow your team’s knowledge about the business of Drupal consulting and the open source world. Hear about the profitable ways to contribute back to community and expand your business practice as well.

Pick a track and get started.

Now that you know where you rank, pick the next level you want to achieve and get started.