In this 3-day, hands-on, course, we begin with an overview of the architecture of Drupal, its core modules and the place of contributed modules in the Drupal "ecosystem". We dive into the folder structure and discuss it's importance and how to best use it. In Tools and Rules, we start easing into setting up our development environment and discuss the always important role the Drupal community plays in setting up coding standards, as well as the guidelines around writing secure code. We also discuss the the drupal.org site in depth and look at various components of the site which allow us to assess module health and long-term viability. From there we move into the code...

This course contains approximately 50% lecture and 50% hands-on exercise material.

Note: This training is intended for developers who have already a solid knowledge of Drupal, from a user's perspective. Prior knowledge of HTML, JavaScript or CSS are a plus, but not mandatory.

Course Agenda

Introduction
Drupal Architecture and Structure
Setting up a Drupal Development Environment
Installing and setting up "must-have" development modules

What is "Core"?
 Drupal's folder structure and why its important.
 The ever important sites folder: /modules, sites/all/modules, sites/mysite.com/modules
    (Which one is used? How do you know?)
 Drupal's module weighting and selection process
 Basic structure of a module:  .module, .info, .install files

Tools and Rules
Using the Drupal CVS system - remote and locally
Drupal coding standards
Doxygen, and its importance
Demonstration of api.drupal.org and the API module
Writing secure code
Devel and Coder modules

Understanding Hooks
 Overview of what a hook is
 Demonstration of a hook
 Simple module implementing hook_nodeapi and drupal_set_message.
 Naming conventions
 Introduction to few important hooks: init, menu, nodeapi, block, user
 How to create yonur own hooks for other modules

Database
 What if you need custom storage?
 Understanding Drupals Database API and Database Structure
 Using the .install file for installation and updating
 Drupal 6 and changes in Drupal 7, the Schema API, Schema Module

Forms API
 FAPI, the Forms API
 Why use an API?
 hook_form_alter() hooks for forms!

Custom nodes
 How to create a custom node
 Why not just use CCK?
 A node module's tacklebox hook_load, hook_update, hook_delete, etc.
 
Playing Sherlock Holmes
 Analyzing a core module
 Analyzing the node module
 Analyzing the comment module
 Demystifying the magic of "core" Drupal code

Taking it to Drupal.org (D.O.)
 Creating a project on drupal.org
 Getting CVS access
 Managing the issue's queue