Getting Hands-On

What are the real capabilities of Drupal? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How do you get it to do what you want? And with over 400 contributed modules, how do you choose the right ones for your project?

This workshop will be focused on architecting, building, and theming a single project -- a Drupal-based community photo sharing site. Whether you're new to Drupal or you're still trying to decide if it is the right platform for your site, this is the workshop for you. We will get hands-on with Drupal, walk through the process of setting up a Drupal site and discuss its parts, features, modules, concepts, and how they all work. We'll discuss best practices for creating an efficient, well-tuned site and talk about the best ways of working with Drupal to keep your site future-proof, speedy, and robust.

We'll also demo several high-end Drupal sites including recent Lullabot projects for MTV, Sony, Participant Productions, Fearless Living, This Week In Tech, and others - pointing out the Drupal parts and show how Drupal can be customized through contributed and custom modules and theme development. You will see Drupal concepts and solutions in real-world applications.

Registration and continental breakfast at 9:30 am, classes go from 10 am - 5 pm.

Bring with you: You will find it helpful (but not absolutely necessary) to have a laptop computer with you. You may also want access to a sandbox installation of Drupal that you can play with - or simply access to a web hosting environment compatible with Drupal and well help you get it installed.

Who's Teaching?

This class will be led by Lullabot principal Jeff Robbins, along with Jeff Eaton and James Walker. Lullabot and its founders have created sites for MTV, Ringo Starr, Sony Records, Participant Productions, Leo Laporte (This Week In Tech), television star Rhonda Britten, and many others. They have also contributed many Drupal modules including the ecommerce package, Simple Access, sIFR, TinyMCE, Login Toboggan and contributed to many Drupal core improvements and bug fixes.

Who Should Attend?

• Internet savvy individuals with some technical skills who aren't too scared of a little HTML, FTPing, and generally mucking about with a website.

Prerequisites: none.

Attendees should be familiar with (X)HTML and CSS concepts. Previous experience with Drupal is a plus, but not required. Attendance is limited so register soon.

Past Attendees Say:

Smart, experienced, and friendly. If you like that sort of thing... -- Geoff Butterfield, Director of IT, The George Lucas Education Foundation

I learned more in a day with the Lullabot team, than I would have in a year on my own. Fantastic experience! -- Darren Mak, Digital Web

This workshop is great because it is hands-on, and helped me get past some of the steep learning curves that come with Drupal. -- Richard Geel, SBSI

What Should I Bring?

Bring your laptop in order to get the full benefit of the workshop. Lullabot will provide each participant their own hosted Drupal site to work on during class.

If you need help making a decision about attending, have further questions about the class, or wish to pay by means other than paypal, please contact us.