Workshops

Heard good things about Search API but haven’t had time to set it up? Have experience with ApacheSolr module but rely on hosted Solr? Wish you could develop locally on your own local Solr instance? Want a tour of all the power and possibilities Search API can provide for your sites?

Search API module provides a powerful framework that lets you integrate your site with search backends like ApacheSolr and build out searchable interfaces of any Drupal entity with Views. Want a fully searchable user directory, a faceted sitewide search, or search-based related content panes? These can all be built with Views.

At Zivtech we have developed open source tools which make setting up ApacheSolr instances and Search API configurations trivial. I’ll walk you through setting up and introduce you to these tools at the beginning of the training, ensuring everyone quickly has a working ApacheSolr instance on a local sandbox site. Then we’ll build Views with Search API, and add and configure facets with Facet API. We’ll use drush to work with with the search index. Finally we’ll look at how you can improve search results relevancy and add custom fields to the index with a custom module. I’ll show you sites I’ve built with Search API including searchable maps, stores, and video libraries.

Prerequisites

• Download Virtualbox ahead of time
• Have git installed
• You should have experience with Drupal 7 site building with Views and be comfortable at the command line.

With the power of Panels, you never have to make a .tpl file ever again! Okay, that’s not true at all, but what Panels does give you is the ability you to create Drupal aware layouts that can be reused between dozens of other sites. If you create custom Panel pages per-content type, per-node, per-anything (instead of custom .tpl’s for each) you will significantly reduce the number of .tpls you have to keep create and keep track of while saving a significant amount of time. Say goodbye to crowded templates folders!

Prerequisites

No knowledge of PHP is required, but a willingness to learn and elementary understanding of programming languages is a necessity. Proficiency in CSS and HTML are required for theming, but only an understanding is required for this workshop. Experience with Drupal configuration and use of contributed modules/themes is helpful for understanding the concepts of theme development.

Drupal Commerce is an open source eCommerce framework developed to help you create unique online shopping experiences. Its core modules provide the basic systems you need to do business online without hard-coding assumptions for any particular business model, allowing you to build sites that meet your business needs instead of getting in your way.

Built on top of Drupal Commerce, Commerce Kickstart 2.0 is a distribution of Drupal that installs a demo store out of the box, implementing a variety of eCommerce best practices and improving the store administrator user experience. It is feature-rich, including numerous contributed modules that add helpful functionality to Drupal Commerce.

In this course, you will learn how to launch your next online store with Commerce Kickstart 2.0 from project creators Commerce Guys. Through a series of alternating lessons and hands-on exercises, you will install the distribution, customize it, and prepare to launch your own fantasy store during this day long training. Handbooks will be provided, but each student should come prepared with a Drupal development environment on a laptop they can use for the duration of the training.

Prerequisites

Attendees should have some eCommerce experience and be used to Drupal 7. Prior experience with Views and Rules is not required but is certainly helpful. Students looking to prepare should spend some time reading tutorials or watching videos about Rules 2, Views 3, or Drupal Commerce itself.

Almost anyone with a bit of Drupal knowledge can build a functional Drupal site these days, but what happens when it’s time to get the last 5 years of your organization’s content into that snazzy new site? More often than not, the solution involves hiring outside help or migrating content manually (ugh). Fortunately, the Drupal community has written some amazing tools to assist with content migration, and this workshop will demonstrate how to utilize them. Examples of migrating data from comma-separated-values files (via the Feeds module), Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 (via the Migrate module), and from an generic MySql database (also via the Migrate module) will form the basis for the workshop. Participants can expect to leave the workshop with confidence that they can tackle their next data migration project.

Prerequisites

Participants should have a good base knowledge of Drupal fundamentals for the Feeds migration portion of the workshop. The Migration module examples will involve a generous amount of object-oriented PHP code.

Do you love Drupal but find that it’s not the right platform for some of the realtime applications you want to build? Are all your friends having fun with Node.js and you want to be one of the cool kids (again)? This hands-on training course will teach you how to create a realtime web application in Node.js and Drupal. You’ll write code all day :-)

After this class, you’ll have written your first node.js application(s) and have integrated Node.js’s realtime wizardry into Drupal’s content management magic.

Our Web Chefs will show you how to:

• Improve your Javascript knowledge in our crash course in JS101
• Write your first node.js application from the ground up
• Understand how to use NPM node’s world class package manager
• Write non-blocking asynchronous code and how to spot it’s evil twin: synchronous blocking code
• Know what Node.js is good at and when a different tool is better
• Gain experience with the popular Node.js framework: Express
• Write API endpoints in Drupal to connect to your realtime application
• Write code that reads and writes data to and from your Drupal site.
• Understand the new Node.js Drupal module.

Prerequisites

Laptop with SFTP, SSH software and a text editor installed. Any Local operating system is fine, but keep in mind that our trainers don’t have experience debugging Windows connectivity problems.

For Node.js

• Basic knowledge of Javascript
• Have used JQuery for to add functionality
• Knowledge of Javascript Object Oriented Patterns
• Experience with AJAX patterns helpful
• Have written applications in Javascript and/or A C style OO programer comfortable picking up a new language
• Comfortable using the command line to navigate directories and launch programs (cd, ls, etc.)

For Drupal

• Comfortable writing PHP to use Drupal hooks and have written a custom module
• Working knowledge of the services module is helpful, and a great thing to try beforehand.

This is the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Drupal. You’ll learn all of the key concepts you need to understand, navigate and begin building a Drupal site. We’ve taught new Drupal users from the White House to Harvard and the New York Transit Commission to the small business owner. We’ll help it make sense.

• Part 1: Introduction to Drupal: What? Who? When? Why?
• Part 2: Installing Drupal
• Part 3: Navigating the Drupal interface
• Part 4: Understanding Drupal content
• Part 5: Managing Drupal content using content types
• Part 6: Adding data fields to Drupal content
• Part 7: Choosing and configuring modules
• Part 8: Choosing and configuring themes
• Part 9: Configuring and working with Drupal user permissions
• Part 10: Building a full Drupal site so that students can practice everything they learned during the class

Attendees will need a laptop with Acquia’s Dev Desktop installed, if they wish to follow along with the tasks.

Prerequisites

None