Our CapitalCamp workshop is all about getting people up to speed with various community tools. We're going to spend three hours walking through the basic things you need to get geared up, and while we're stoked to be able to do this live in DC at the camp, we figured we could also share the resources we're using for others out there who'd like to do this as well. Each session begins with a short, simple, 15-minute presentation, and then we move into demonstration and hands-on work. Here is a breakdown of the three sessions and what resources we'll be pointing people to:
Session 1: Community and Communication tools
The first session slides briefly cover why the Drupal community is the best asset you have, what we'll be covering in the workshop, gives a quick tour of the Drupal community websites, and then we finish up with getting everyone who doesn't have a Drupal.org account to make one.
The websites we talk about are:
We introduce the Drupal Ladder site because, even though it is not an official Drupal property, we will be using lessons from the Ladder for portions of the workshop today, and it is just generally a great initiative.
In addition to a community tour and creating accounts, we'll also give a tour of the Drupal.org issue queue and how it works, because this is a main part of communication and getting stuff done, but many people don't know it's there or are afraid of using it. We will do only the very first part of the Drupal Ladder Getting started in the issue queue lesson (free video), where we create a new issue. We stop there and will resume it later in the workshop.
We wrap up the first session by having everyone in the class hop on IRC using Freenode's webchat. We'll have a little chatter on IRC and see how useful the channel bot can be. IRC is another major communication tool that many people are unaware of, or uncomfortable with, but it is such a great way to get to know other people and work collaboratively in real-time. For more info on using IRC, check these resources on Drupal.org:
Session 2: Local Development Environment
A local "development" environment is not just for developers. It is for anyone who is working on a website and testing out new things. It makes playing with, breaking, and learning about Drupal so much nicer. We will demonstrate using the Drupal Ladder Install Drupal locally lesson (free video) to get Drupal up and running with the Dev Desktop. There are definitely other web servers that can be used though, and while we'll be demonstrating Dev Desktop, everyone can set up using whichever system they prefer. We have a number of free videos for the various operating systems out there:
Once we have Drupal on our local computer, we'll do a brief introduction and demo of Drush. This is a such a great tool for everyone, including site builders, themers, devs, and sysadmins. We have a Guide on the site for Developer and Deployment tools, which includes an entire free series on Command Line Basics, as well as a whole series on Drush (Installing Drush on *nix is a free video), and lots of other goodies which are useful to even folks who don't call themselves "developers."
Session 3: Version Control and Git
In our last session, we'll talk about using version control, and then install and use the system the Drupal community uses: Git. We'll follow the Drupal Ladder Install Git lesson (Free video) and then, if we have time, we'll finish the Issue Queue lesson from earlier by using Git to get a sandbox version of Drupal to find the bug reported in the issue we created.
We won't have time to get into really using Git, but there are a lot of good resources out there. Github has a handy tutorial available at http://try.github.com which we'd recommend you playing with to see how many of the basics of Git work. For those who want videos about Git, we have two of them (you'll need a Drupalize.Me account to access these though):
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Thanks for the great series of sessions at CapitalCamp!
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