Training Introduction
The purpose of this page is to be the central place for AoL developers to go to receive their introduction training as new Drupal Developers as part of the AoL team.
Below is a list of training subjects linked to the supporting training page that will enable you to go into much better training. Recommend you start at the top of this page and work down to the bottom. Once you get to the bottom, come back to the top of the page and follow each training link and take the training.
Make sure was you go through that you record your training time in Quickbooks and mark it as "non-billable". Feel free to seek out other training and knowledge, but I ask that you not track this as company training time. As future developers I highly encourage you pursue your curiosity.
Training Subjects
Drupal Overview
"Drupal is content management software. It's used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need.
It's also a great choice for creating integrated digital frameworks. You can extend it with any one, or many, of thousands of add-ons. Modules expand Drupal's functionality. Themes let you customize your content's presentation. Distributions are packaged Drupal bundles you can use as starter-kits. Mix and match these components to enhance Drupal's core abilities. Or, integrate Drupal with external services and other applications in your infrastructure. No other content management software is this powerful and scalable.
The Drupal project is open source software. Anyone can download, use, work on, and share it with others. It's built on principles like collaboration, globalism, and innovation. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). There are no licensing fees, ever. Drupal will always be free." This was taken from Drupal.org and if you wish to read more from Drupal.org follow along to their About Page.
To continue your training, once you have reviewed the rest of this page, please go to our Drupal Overview training page.
This training will take you around four hours.
Migration Related Training
HTML
Hyper Text Markup Language is the language web developers use to add structure to web pages so browsers can render or present them. You combine content and HTML to create the basic page and its structure. It is important for us to understand the basics of how this works so we can effectively clean-up the pages we migrate.
To learn more about HTML go to our HTML Training page. This training will take you about two hours or so.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is how developer change the bland black and white structure of an HTML webpage into a beautiful and artistic web page. Using CSS a develop can change the shape, color, size and nearly every aspect of a web page.
We will not use it directly very much, but in cleaning up pages we may well come across it and its effects so it is important for us to have a general understanding of what it is and how it works. To get a more details on this language please go to our CSS Training page.
This training will take a little over an hour.
Web Tools Setup
First time through reading this page skip this paragraph. When you come back to this and start actually doing all the training follow this to our setup page. This page will walk you through setting up the command line tools below.
If you are starting with content migration as a task, the only tool you need to set up is Notepad++. If you are going to be doing website updating or working with the website code in any way you will need to go through all of the setup.
Setting up your tools is billable time so please make sure to track it as such.
When ready, go to our Web Tools Setup page.
Drupal Website Updating
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) command line tool that we use to interact with the websites. If this means nothing to you that is completely ok. You will learn. In short, the Ubuntu WSL is an application with a black screen that you will type into to interact with your computer and our websites. To learn more go to our Ubuntu Training page and do the training it is linked to.
The Ubuntu training will take you about an hour.
Composer and Dependencies
Drupal is made up of what is called modules. These module, or projects, are stand alone groups of code that create functionality in the Drupal site. Modules are lumped into three categories; core, contributed and custom. Core modules create what we call Drupal. We never ever touch the core modules directly. These core modules are common to every Drupal site. Next, there are the modules created and shared by the greater Drupal community and these are called contributed modules. These modules add functionality to the website. There is a common phrase when it comes to adding functionality; "There is a module for that". Then there are modules that individual developers or teams create for themselves and these are called custom modules. With these three categories module in mind, each module occasionally gets updated to add functionality or improve security. This is where Composer comes in.
Composer is a command line tool we use through Ubuntu to add, remove, and update these modules in our websites. This is a critical skill for us when it comes to updating websites. To learn more about us go to our Composer Training page.
Git
Git is a command line tool we use through Ubuntu to help manage code. It is very important to understand the basics of git and code management because it is critical when it comes to us updating websites and interacting with the code on websites. The is also an important tool for teams in all development fields to share and manage code. To learn more, go to our Git Training page.
This training will take you about an hour.
Pantheon Dashboard
Pantheon is the hosting service we use to host our websites. One of the great aspects of Pantheon is their dashboard which enables you to work on the the websites. Understanding how the dashboard works is critical to operating with the websites.
Follow this link to our Pantheon Dashboard training page.
Terminus
Pantheon is the hosting company we use to host all of the websites. Pantheon is a very user friendly place to host our sites. As part of their service, they have created their own command line tool called Terminus. It is very, very powerful and with a few strokes of a key you can create and destroy websites. We use it frequently when we update websites. Please go to our Terminus Training to learn more.
Drush
Drush is a Drupal Community command line tool we use through Ubuntu to interact with our websites. What Terminus is to Pantheon users Drush is to the Drupal community who interact with their websites through a command line tool like Ubuntu. To learn more please go to Drush Training.
Ahoy
Ahoy is a command line tool that allows teams to write scripts for them to run. For example, it is possible with Ahoy to create ahoy commands that incorporate Terminus and or Composer to create a new website or update a website. We will not write our own Ahoy commands, but when it comes to updating websites we will use them constantly. It is important to understand that these are custom commands that only work within this team and that these commands group together different Terminus, Composer, Drush and Git commands.
Conclusion
We have covered a ton of stuff here. Remember, this is intended as an overview. You will master each of these as we work. The purpose of this page is to give you a wide overview so when we start talking, training and working you have the context to better understand. As part of this there are two groupings of lessons.
Migration
As part of migration you will want to understand the Drupal Overview, HTML and CSS. By having a good beginners understanding of these you will rapidly master migrating content and cleaning up content.
Site Updating
This is a much more advanced skill and we will get to it in time. So, to start with you should have a basic understanding of Ubuntu, Composer, Git, Pantheon Dashboard, Terminus, Drush, Ahoy and generally what modules are and how they relate to Drupal. With this general understanding we will be able to begin our hands on learning of how to update sites.
Don't forget to record your time as non-billable hours.
Thanks.