Advanced Drupal Development with Features (Drupal Training)
Event Info
Description
Drupal sites can be developed faster and more reliably if you adopt the proper workflow. This Drupal training course gives advanced practical advice on the tools you need for a more effective development. Organise site development in a modular way with Features and Code-Driven Development, enabling team collaboration, reusable code and precise traceability of changes. Operate faster on your Drupal sites with Drush. Upgrade your Drupal sites smoothly by leveraging the Drupal update mechanism instead of relying on database dumps.
Advanced Drupal Development with Features - course information
Date: Thursday, 14th and Friday, 15th July 2011
Time: 9:00am till 5:00pm
Location: 10-12 Russell Square, Russell Square House, London, WC1B 5EH
Cost: £800 (Including VAT - 10% discount available for charities, BIMA, RSA members)
Who's this Drupal course suitable for?
The target public is Drupal developers who need to precisely track changes to a website, to cooperate remotely on sites development, to push changes to production sites safely, or simply to streamline their development workflow.
Participants should be familiar with building Drupal sites using the standard point-and-click interface and willing to take their development techniques to a new level. A basic knowledge of PHP is expected too.
The course is focused on Drupal 7, but all techniques can be used also for Drupal 6 sites, with trivial adaptations that are explained in the course.
Delivery and content
The course will enable you to:
- Streamline your Drupal development thanks to an advanced usage of the Features module.
- Manage site updates cleanly by using a controller feature.
- Put the whole site configuration in code, even when a module does not offer a proper Features integration.
- Deploy sites faster by using Drush and an optimal shell configuration.
- Reuse configuration across sites and share development tasks with a team.
The course is hands-on: through exercises and guided examples, we will see practical applications of every concept and discuss real-life use cases.
Course Topics
1. Preliminaries - The Road to #codepower
The traditional Drupal development cycle
Challenges with the traditional development
The Code-Driven Development approach
How code-driven development solves common shortcomings
2. First Steps - Basic work with Features
The Features module and its basic workflow
File formats in Features
Defining Feature boundaries
3. Exportables in Drupal
What can be put in code?
Inner workings of Features
Overview of the CTools API
CTools integration: how to make a module configuration exportable
4. Project bootstrap - Makefile and Profile
Makefile and Profile: role and file format
Keeping the Makefile up-to-date
Handling patches in a sustainable way
5. Code-Driven Development Workflow
6. Advanced topics and guided examples
RESGISTER HERE!
What do I need to bring? Bring your laptop so that you are able to benefit from the practical exercises. You should have a working local Drupal development environment (and optionally your favorite IDE and drush installed).