Drupal Hyderabad Workshop

Day 1

Started at 8 AM from home and met Siva, ipsita and few others at paradise around 8.30 AM. On 1st day, we have arranged a mini bus. We picked up prajwala and few others from Azri  and reached the venue at 10.30 AM.

The day started with few talks from professors of VNR VJIET college, kiran chandra generaly secreatry of swecha.

Then we had  a Tea break and the actual sessions started at 12.

The first session was on "How to customize core modules" and it was by me followed by talk from prajwala on Advanced theming. Then we break for lunch. After lunch, the talks started with ipsita on multi site installation, followed by prajwala on jquery in Drupal and Drupalcon SF meet. Then We had a tea break. After Tea, i started the talk on Coding standards and Internationalization.

Then we had an interesting debate on cloud computing. The debate took time to get started as there are not many having knowledge on cloud computing and few took time to understand the actual debate. Once people get hang on debate, i felt it could be never ending as the debate on cloud computing can be done for hours together.

Most of the sessions on Day1 are monologue as there are not many drupal developers attended the workshop. Most of them are newbies, students and php developers. We tried our best in explaining the concepts as simple as possible so that non drupal devs were also able to understand with lesser effort.

Day 2

The Day 2 started by Medhamsh on web development basics or rather i should say networking basics. The session is more about networking commands, setting up the domain, etc. The next session is by Ramakrishna on Introduction to drupal followed by drupal installation by Srujan. This was the fun part.

Since day 2 is more of hands on sessions, everyone has to install drupal in their systems. Srujan is guidingg the students through the projector and telling the commands. We all (volunteers) were helping the students whoever are facing the issues.

There are few students who have not used ubuntu before and there are few systems which does not have required packages installed. Moreover while installing drupal in 50-60 systems, we have faced diff. issues of installations which we have not seen before. The session went for more than 1 and a half hour to get drupal installed successfully on all the systems.

Then we break for lunch. During lunch, we have taken a group photo.

After lunch, the session started by me on Drupal core modules and configurations. I tried my best to cover the basics of drupal and at the same time give them an idea of what drupal is capable of. I have shown how to manage content, users, permissions and modules.

The next session is by Saitanay on Cck and views. This was one of the sessions which had been bouncer for newbies. Nothing against the speaker, he did his best in explaining the things. But the problem was since drupal got installed only couple of hours before on student systems, the contriubted modules cck and views were not available in their instances. So they were unable to follow the settings which saitanay is showing on his instance.

Then we had a tea break.

After tea break, prajwala took session on basic themes followed by ipsita on community support and usage of irc channels. After that, siva collected the feedback from students and we had a valedictory session.

Overall the 2 days of workshop is satisfactory and i felt that the effort spent over the last 5-6 weeks by drupal hyd group members have paid off.

Thank you for reading the post. Comments are welcome :)