Drupal Site Building & Architecture

Course Description

The Drupal content management system is known for its flexibility. Drupal can be used for many types of websites, from corporate websites and media portals to e-commerce sites, community forums, and intranets. Site builders have the task of customizing Drupal depending on the content and feature-set they want to provide.

This course will give you a thorough understanding of the Drupal site building process. You'll get hands-on experience creating an information architecture for Drupal, and implementing advanced features with Drupal core and contributed modules.

Learning Objectives

You'll come away from the course with knowledge of:

• How to add complex and powerful functionality to Drupal using core and contrib

• Considerations for planning and structuring content

• Differences between entity types

• Selecting and installing contributed modules

• How to configure key contributed modules

• Best practices for launching and maintaining a secure and speedy website

• The limits of Drupal site building and when custom theming or module development is required

Outline

You'll have lessons to complete between live sessions (exercises with video instructions) and access to a Slack channel and a one-on-one session to help you out.

• Install Party & Introductions: In this session, we'll make sure you're set up for success. We'll check that you have all the requirements for the course and troubleshoot any setup issues. We'll also do class introductions and talk about the Drupal content architecture and what you can build using Drupal.
• Content in Drupal: Learn about your options for building out content in Drupal. Common content entity types like taxonomy and nodes, and how to add fields to content entity types.
• Content Architecture Workshop: An interactive session: look at the information architecture for two example websites. Review the types of content on each website, the relationships between the content, and what fields each type of content has.
• Views: Learn when and how to use Views to get your content out of the database and organize it on the page. Turn your Drupal website into a truly dynamic tool for content management.
• Building Flexible Content: Create a landing page using Paragraphs, using Media and Layout Builder.
• Wrap-Up: What are the challenges and benefits of building a website using Drupal? What are the best practices for site building and maintenance? Discuss how to get the most out of Drupal and the open source community.

Who Will Get the Most Out of This Course

This course is ideal for site builders, developers and newcomers to Drupal who want to be able to configure Drupal effectively. For more advanced techniques, check out the Advanced Site Building course.