Sessions at DrupalCon London 2011 about Drupal on Monday 22nd August

• Do you want to learn more about Drupal?
• Do you want to learn how to run a Drupal site professionally?
• Do you want to get your questions answered by Drupal experts?
• Do you want to get a fast and thorough introduction to Drupal before Drupalcon?

The Absolute Beginners Guide to Drupal is for you!

This course will take you from an intermediate Drupal site builder to a rock solid configurator. During the day we will work with practical examples and exercises to see how you can use some of Drupal’s most important modules to achieve complex functionality based on actual sites. You will not only learn how to use these modules one by one, but also how to combine them in order to manifold their use cases. Each topic in the course has a set of exercises ranging from relatively easy tasks to really challenging tasks, assuring that you will never have to get stuck or be left with nothing to do. You are guaranteed to have a full dose of Drupal!

The Aegir Hosting System is a scalable solution for deploying and managing Drupal sites. Aegir automates many common server-side tasks, simplifying install, upgrade, clone, backup and restore operations on Drupal sites and platforms. Sysadmins, developers, and site administrators can all benefit from this.

This course is a jump-in-the-deep-end, hands-on introduction to Aegir. We will cover:

• Aegir's components and community
• Installing, upgrading and debugging Aegir
• Importing existing sites
• Building a Drupal platform with Drush Make
• Customizing and extending Aegir and other advanced topics.

Students will learn how Drupal works under the hood by building simple example modules and dissecting more complex code. We'll explore Drupal's most common hooks; learn how to use them together by building a simple module that responds to internal Drupal events; and investigate Drupal 7's new database abstraction layer.

Learn the best practices for tuning and scaling Drupal sites from the Drupal Performance Dream Team.

Commerce Guys' Drupal Powered E-commerce is an intense workshop style training that covers everything from downloading to configuring Drupal Commerce for use on a new Drupal 7 website. We alternate 15 - 30 minute lectures with hands-on practice sessions where additional Commerce Guys trainers answer questions and guide students through the process of building their own Drupal e-commerce website. Students should come prepared to build a Drupal 7 site and expect to leave with an awareness of all that Drupal Commerce has to offer and a functional understanding of how to build their first Commerce powered store.

jQuery for Drupal developers and themers. Learn to master the jQuery tools provided by Drupal. With this course you will be able to add jQuery and Javascript to Drupal themes and forms and write Javascript for Drupal modules. The course consists of a mix of explanation, demonstration and hands-on exercises. All course subjects are covered by the exercises.

With a combination of presentation, discussion and hands-on activities, developers will reverse-engineer and augment a Drupal site. Developers will get familiar with key tools of the trade for site maintenance. They will learn about site building, module and theme development; about Drupal’s structure “under the hood”, and how to architect a flexible site. They will find out about opportunities for developers and how they can apply their experience from other areas.

Even well-seasoned Drupal developers can be tempted to start creating a site with the modules and implementation strategies they’re familiar with, making important decisions that dramatically impact content architecture before they’ve taken a look at the bigger picture. Through several exercises and real-world examples, participants will learn strategies for designing flexible content types, views, and taxonomies, and we’ll demonstrate what a truly flexible architecture can provide. We’ll talk about how seemingly simple requirements and integration with external systems can dramatically influence architectural decisions.

As the Drupal community grows, so does the need to educate newcomers joining in from many directions and with multiple motivations. Drupal Education is increasingly recognised as a major and growing need for the growing Drupal community. At the same time many people are making inroads in using Drupal in educational contexts opening up possibilities for interesting synergies.