Drupal Gardens Training from Nancy Nicoles

Here's the secret to a quick and easy start with Drupal: Drupal Gardens.

Need a little help with your Drupal Gardens site? Want to explore some new functionalities? Try ScreenShare Training, and learn when and where you want.

Explore the possibilities of Drupal Gardens with a trained guide. Learn from Nancy Nicoles, who wrote/adapted the Drupal 7 module tutorial on drupal.org. In addition to her experience as site builder, Nancy is also maintainer of the 'Form API reference', and co-maintainer of 'Examples for developers' on drupal.org. Visit her portfolio site for more information.

How It Works

• Sessions are sold by time. For example, the Foundation Kit lasts an hour and a half. How many topics we cover in that time will depend on how quickly you understand the basic concepts. A Foundation Kit could possibly cover everything included in the Construction Kit for someone who has some experience with Drupal. If we finish the planned topics early, we will go on to additional subjects.
• All sessions can be oriented toward site administrators and content creators as well as site builders. Knowing HTML or CSS is not necessary.
• We will talk via phone or Skype, your choice. Sessions delivered in English only.
• Sessions can be tailored for Digital Marketers. We can discuss how to set up your own A/B or multivariate testing.
• Scheduled between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm Central Time (GMT - 5:00). Exceptions may be made to schedule two hours earlier or later.
• See below for details on screen sharing and how to order.

Available Sessions

Foundation Kit

What's covered: Initial site setup, users, roles, permissions, blocks, theme and logo. If training goes quickly, may include topics from the Construction Kit session.

Just getting started with Drupal Gardens and want some guidance? This is the session for you. We will start at the very beginning and go through basic site configuration, contact form, basics of site structure. We'll get the site name and logo in place (if you have one), other basic settings configured, look into user roles and permissions, and tour the ThemeBuilder. If you prefer ongoing weekly sessions to cover the same information, see A Month of Sessions below.

Construction Kit

What's covered: Includes menus, more blocks, content types, comments, taxonomy, fields, site export and more if time allows.

Already have a Drupal Gardens site running but need some help to move it forward? Choose the Construction Kit, or move on to this session after finishing the Foundation Kit. (We recommend allowing at least a week between the two so that you can absorb what you learned in the first session.) We'll go farther into Drupal Garden's capabilities to flesh out your site's functionality. Tailored to what you need for your site. If you prefer ongoing weekly sessions to cover the same information, see A Month of Sessions below.

ThemeBuilder

What's covered: In depth exploration of all areas of the Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder

Learn how to change the appearance of your site using the proprietary Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder, which allows you to theme your site without directly writing CSS (cascading style sheets) or any other code. We'll check out the many theme options, modify backgrounds, borders and spacing, fonts, layout, and palettes, and look into the advanced capabilities of the interface. If we have time, we'll add professional fonts from fonts.com. Knowing HTML and CSS are helpful but not required. If you prefer ongoing weekly sessions to cover the same information, see A Month of Sessions below.

Webform

What's covered: Building forms with Drupal Garden's Webform content type

In this session, you will learn how to create forms, collect data, and send yourself notification emails using the Webform module. We will create a contact form, survey/order form, and appointment block. In the course of building these forms, you will use every component Webform has to offer. If you have a specific form(s) you want to build, we can substitute it for one of the example forms.

Organize Content (Views)

What's covered: Use of Simple View and Views.

Saying that the Views module will help organize content on your site is somewhat underwhelming. Once you know what Views can do for you, you will understand why it is an indispensible for almost any Drupal website and possibly the most popular contributed module on drupal.org. Want to list all of a certain kind of content? or make a glossary? build a calendar with appointments shown? Then you need Views. With Views, you can enter data once, then reuse it as many times as you need in different contexts. From the Views project page: "Among other things, Views can be used to generate reports, create summaries, and display collections of images and other content." In this session, we will explore the default views included with the module, create a repository of articles searchable by taxonomy term, and create a recent news block and page. See the Scheduled Sessions page for a Views example.

SEO

What's covered: Drupal Garden and Google SEO tools.

Optimize your site for the search engines with SEO tools. We'll explore the tools available on Drupal Gardens, including URL alias, titles, meta tags for the front page, AddThis, and XML sitemap. We'll also get your site signed up for Google Webmaster tools, submit your sitemap, add a +1 button, and activate Google Analytics.

Display jQuery

What's covered: jQuery accordion, calendar, tabs, and dialog (overlay)

Add some interactivity to your site with jQuery. Drupal Gardens comes with powerful jQuery libraries built in, but it's a little tricky to figure out how to use them. I will send you 5 HTML templates, and 1 jQuery template (which can be used for any of the jQuery functions), then explain exactly how to make them work. Note: these jQuery scripts are for display only, not for collecting data. Knowledge of javascript or jQuery is not necessary, although some understanding of programming principles would be helpful. Check out jQuery Examples to see these libraries in action.

A Month of Sessions

What's covered: Whatever you need, from site setup and configuration, to SEO, to media handling, Views and more. For someone new to Drupal, this option will start with the topics included in the Foundation Kit, the Construction Kit, and the ThemeBuilder session.

Want weekly sessions? With the 'Month of Sessions' option, we will explore the many facets of Drupal Gardens, with more exercises. Try out what you learn during the week and have your questions answered in the next session. Don't worry about remembering everything all at once; we'll go over things until you are comfortable. If you are learning with videos or tutorials, we can go over the confusing parts. You can continue with the 'Month of Sessions' until you feel you have learned all you want.

Tell Me Again (Review)

My goal is to give you all the information you need in a given session to accomplish the tasks at hand. But when you get onto the computer by yourself, you may find that you don't quite remember some things, or there are other questions you forgot to ask. You need the Tell Me Again session. We can go over anything included in the previous session, or other issues that pertain to it.