One of the most important sessions I taught as a technical consultant was the one week Drupal Jumpstart. Here, my students learn how to do everything in Drupal from adding content, and installing modules on day 1, all the way to setting up complex multiple content-type relationships and combining their displays using panels and views on day 5.
This session is going to focus on what happens on days 2 and 3 of my training program. These days are exclusively dedicated to teaching students how to use the views modules. The program consists of 8 real world (and useful) views that are created with an increasing level of complexity. The views functionality covered will include:
1) creating pages
2) overriding system pages
3) working different display methods
4) working with multiple displays
5) filter and context filters
6) advanced context filters
7) relationships
And many others.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this class, you will be able to take almost any display currently being used in drupal, and override it, making it fit better with your particular admin style and needs.
Syllabus
Class begins at 09:00, lunch is at 11:45, class ends at 17:00.
Hour 1:
Discussion about views. What is a view? How is the Views UI organized. Discussion about tricks for reading other peoples views and understanding what is happening.
Hour 2, Lesson 1: Building a basic view - the front page. We'll traverse through re-implementing the (river of news style) front page layout, and discuss how to make incremental changes to illustrate the basic concepts.
Hours 3-4, Lesson 2: Building the content listing page. We'll learn about overriding existing system screens, providing advanced menu support (local tasks) and how to use tables, sorting, bulk operations and more.
Hours 5-6, Lesson 3: Multiple displays, context filters and advanced context filters. Here we'll take our now functional views, replicate them in various ways, and apply them to other areas of Drupal that currently don't exist. You'll learn how to accept filtering values via the url and establish complex url paths to your views.
Hours 6+: we'll create additional views that provide facet style displays and additionally add slideshows and other common view components.
Who will gain the most from this course?
Users with a basic understanding of Drupal will benefit from this course. Users who want to build or customize displays or layouts, or simply build their own administrative areas will love this course.
Prerequisites for this course
You should understand how to create content types, and add content. Having some basic drupal experience is pretty helpful! Most beginners can be brought up to speed fairly quickly with this.