{"id":4159,"date":"2013-07-27T02:38:56","date_gmt":"2013-07-27T10:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/?p=4159"},"modified":"2013-07-27T02:38:56","modified_gmt":"2013-07-27T10:38:56","slug":"getting-started-with-drupal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/2013\/07\/getting-started-with-drupal\/","title":{"rendered":"getting started with drupal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emeline Glynn and Anthony Glynn gave a helpful talk called “How to teach anyone Drupal in 7 months<\/a>.” The timeline was based on their experience where Anthony, an experience Drupal developer, taught Emeline remotely over a period of 7 months, to the point that she is now working professionally as a Drupal developer. Slides posted here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Emeline notes that you need a passionate & dedicated student. It can be very frustrating, especially as someone new to development, especially learning command line tools, git and debugging, but she was excited about it and found it very rewarding even when she was very new. She usually spent 4-6 hours a day. Anthony noted that if someone has experience with another framework, you can expect the timeline to be 2-3x faster.<\/p>\n

I liked this breakdown of stages in learning:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Learn the Language<\/li>\n
  2. Get the Skills<\/li>\n
  3. Cross the Chasm<\/li>\n
  4. Leave Footprints<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For me, as a developer with 20+ years of experience, I pick this stuff up fairly quickly. \u00a0I spent a few solid days on getting my dev env setup, understanding the major components and making small changes to a module. \u00a0As important as the code, is understanding its patterns and jargon. \u00a0The immersive experience of CapitalCamp<\/a> with its enthusiastic community and these references to key learning resources has significantly accelerated the learning curve.<\/p>\n

    This learning path focuses on the non-programmer; however, Anthony suggested (and I agree) that the experienced developer would take a similar path.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Register at drupal.org<\/a>
      \n       drupal.org\/planet<\/a> should be your home page, with news feeds of all the best blogs online<\/li>\n
    2. drupal.org\/security<\/a> – the Drupal security team meets once a week and issues security advisories less frequently — they also have a mailing list.<\/li>\n
    3. Meetups — Anthony learned by reading Pro Drupal Development<\/a> & going to meetups. (He noted that the community is a bit less friendly on line.) Meetups provide inspiration and the landscape of what to learn.<\/li>\n
    4. Setup your dev env
      \nRecommended: Linux, git, Drush, PhPMyAdmin, Firebug or Chrome Developer Tools
      \n(Linux much easier than Windows)
      \nOn Mac OSX \u00a0it is pretty easy too, but finding good setup instructions was hard. \u00a0I       posted the steps I the I use<\/a> and have since added apache vhost config so I can run multiple drupal sites easily.<\/li>\n
    5. Embrace the command line! students may be freaked out at first, but it makes you very productive. If the student is non-technical, there are a lot of skills that are not Drupal that you still need to learn (e.g. command line, git)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Consider starting with a distribution profile<\/p>\n