Sessions at Drupal Developer Days: Brussels about Workshop on Saturday 5th February

Course description

Learn how to get custom functionality using Drupal’s hook system, as well as how to extend or alter contributed module functionality.

Participants in this course will have used CCK, Views and Panels to create websites but have never built their own module. Participants will start writing a simple module and end up being able to create more complex modules, using Forms API, Node API, adhering coding standards and with an eye on testing, security and performance.
Pre-requisites

Site building experience with Drupal 6. Understanding of and experience with PHP.
Training agenda

* Exercise 1: The Kickstart Module
The bare bones of a module. Coding standards. Reference materials
* Exercise 2: Extending the custom module
Implement Node API
* Exercise 3: Configuration settings
Permissions, hook_menu., Form API. Using the API docs

• Break

* Module development best practices
* Exercise 4: Hook_theme
Making your module easily themeable. Best practices
* Exercise 5: Simple test
* Exercise 6: Recap and review
Views to code. Exercise to make a module from exported Views. (module review from start to finish)
Examples module
How to learn more

• Break

* Developer best practices
* Exercise 7: Best practices for development. Site Audit checklist Doing a site check during development to ensure it's running its best
* Exercise 8: Drupal Performance Optimization checklist
Steps to enable caching and optimization of a Drupal installation
* Exercise 9: Troubleshooting Poor Drupal Performance
Looking at front end performance and queries within Drupal to identify and fix problems
* Conclusion and Q + A

By the end of the training you will…

• Understand Drupal's hook system and development architecture
• Learn about the construction of a typical Drupal module
• Make your module easily themeable
• Exports Views into code
• Known the beginnings of Drupal security, performance and optimization
• Be able to add Simpletest

Practical information

• If you plan to follow this training please leave a comment below so we can estimate how many participants will be present
• The training will start at 10 o'clock but please be present about 15 minutes before
• Since it will be a practical training a laptop with a functional LAMP/XAMP/MAMP installation is needed
• We will take a 30 minute break around 12 o'clock