Grabbing Hanuman’s Long Tail - Jacob Singh online

Getting Started

Who are we and what are we doing here? Backgrounds and goals (personal and technical).

• Get to know everyone’s development background and professional history

• Where do we come from as programmers? How does that influence our current approach and approach to learning drupal?

• What do we want to learn and specialize in?

General goals of this training

• Make developing in Drupal fun

• Increase the speed at which you can develop solutions

• Decrease the amount of time you have to spend on donkey work

• Introduce you to the Drupal community and how to leverage / participate in it

• Make the connections between requirements and stock solutions

• Know how and when to hack it

Specific Objectives for today

• Know how to set up drupal sites using multisite deployment

• Understand how to use update status, CVS and drush

• Learn the devel module, masquerade module, and other development tools

• Understand the drupal architecture:

  • What IOC is

  • Why is successful

  • Why is it annoying

Planned Format

• Devs spend as much time in front of computers practicing as possible

• Topics are discussed, examples are shown in existing modules, and practice on a custom module

• Every days ends with ½hr of Q&A

Tools of the trade

• Devel Module

• Coder

• Masquerade

• Project Set-Up and sandbox creation

• admin_menu

• Drush, CVS and update_status

The Drupal Community

• IRC

• Issue Trackers

• groups.drupal.org

• Forums

• drupalmodules.com

• drupal.org/planet

Drupal Architecture

• IOC (Inversion of control model)

• The Hook system

• Drupal Bootsrap process

• Theming Engines and themes

Tea Party

• Learning the hook system via the drink module

Main Core Hooks and their usage

http://api.drupal.org/api/group/hooks/5

hook_menu

Example: contact

hook_nodeapi

Example: path module

hook_help

Example: contact module

hook_user

Example: contact module

To Hack or Not to Hack, that is the question

Form API

Building an admin settings form

• callback to drupal_get_form

• validate hook

• submit hook

Implementing form_alter

Implementing a custom submit hook on a form_alter

Real site planning and development in Drupal

Modules you can’t live without

• CCK

• Views

• Panels 2

• nodequeue

• adminrole

• pathauto

• nodereference

• imagecache

• asset or image + imagefield

• tinymce

How do you build this page:

• List of Nodes w/ RSS & Pager

  • Views

• Custom content type which has related nodes in a heirarchy

  • CCK + nodereference

• Thumbnails in node listing

  • Asset + imagecache

• Cultivated (admin chosen) list of nodes

  • nodequeue

  • views

• Sortable table of nodes and their values

  • Views + Table style plugin

• Complex front page containing any of the above

  • Panels 2