The Learn Drupal Ladder

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We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

In this series we introduce the Drupal Ladder project, and walk through the lessons in the Drupal ladder. This community initiative was created to get more people to help with work on Drupal core. It achieves this by creating lessons that start with the very basic skills needed to help and working their way up the ladder into more skills and tasks. Our series begins with a short presentation about the project, and then the subsequent videos walk through the lessons from the ladder, starting with installing Drupal locally.

Tutorials in this course
Categories
Drupal 7, 8
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In this series we introduce the Drupal Ladder project, and walk through the lessons in the Drupal Ladder.

In this video we'll be looking at some background on this project, and then we'll be looking at how you can actually get involved and progress to becoming a contributor yourself.

The Drupal Ladder Project was a community initiative that started in 2011. The purpose of the project was to get more people contributing to Drupal Core, by teaching people the skills that they need, exposing them to the tools that they need to use within the Drupal Community, and teaching people not just Drupal best practices in terms of code, but also how to actually interact and work with the community.

Additional resources

Categories
Drupal 7, 8
More information

In this video we walk through getting Git version control installed, and then show how to do a few basic things, including how to get a copy of the latest Drupal development code. This video follows the instructions found in the Install Git lesson on learndrupal.org.

This video is installing Git on Windows, because it has the most steps involved. Installation on Mac and Linux is very simple, in that they do not have a wizard to walk through, so they are not demonstrated. All commands used on the command line in the video work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, because Windows is using the Git Bash shell which is part of the Git installation.

Additional resources

Git download page

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In this first step of the Learn Drupal Ladder we will install Drupal on our computer. This follows the instructions to Install Drupal locally on learndrupal.org. We start by getting and installing the Dev Desktop, which is an all-in-one web server which comes with Drupal 7. We then install our own Drupal 8 site in Dev Desktop.

If you do not wish to use Dev Desktop as your local web server, we have videos for three other web servers, based on operating system:

Additional resources

More information on Development Environments

Categories
Drupal 7, 8
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In this step we turn our attention to Drupal.org and the community issue queue. This is where all of the active work for Drupal core takes place. We will look at the queue and create our issue to see how it works. This video follows the instructions for the Getting started in the issue queue lesson on learndrupal.org.

Categories
Drupal 7, 8
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In this video we will walk through the process of testing existing patches in the Drupal.org issue queue. We will read an issue, download and apply the patch with Git, and then test it to see if it works. This video follows the instructions on the Test patches lesson on learndrupal.org.

The lines that I have in my .bash_profile (shown at the end of this video) to add the Git branch to my command line prompt is:

function parse_git_branch {
git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
export PS1="\h:\W \u\$(parse_git_branch)\$ "

I'm using a Mac, so your mileage may vary on other systems.

Categories
Drupal 7, 8
More information

In this video we will write our own patch to resolve an issue. We will take a screenshot of the issue before and after our patch, and upload the images and patch to the Drupal.org issue queue. This video follows the instructions in the Write a patch lesson on drupalladder.org.