GCI 2014 Task: Organize a Drupal installation/basics workshop at your school

Events happening in the community are now at Drupal community events on www.drupal.org.
Posted by cschmittiey on December 12, 2014 at 3:34am

One of my Google Code In tasks has been to teach a group of friends or school mates the basics of installing Drupal. I chose this because I regularly attend my school's Student Technology and Coding Club, and I couldn't imagine a better audience in my high school to teach things like this to.

After the announcements in our meeting, I asked everyone to browse to http://simplytest.me. As they were doing that, I explained what Drupal was, what it could be used for, and why anyone would want to use it. I showed them a site I had prepared earlier, that I had applied a theme and added some basic content to, so that they could not only hear but see the possibilities of a Drupal site.

As we went through the install process, many of my friends expressed amazement at how easy it was to install. I did explain how it's a bit more complicated when not using simplytest, however it's about the same.

After we got Drupal 8 installed, I showed my friends how to change the site's title and slogan, the default theme's colors, and how to install other themes. As they were personalizing their sites, some had questions about how to move around in the administrative interface, so I took a couple minutes and went over that.

Unfortunately, after that, our 30 minutes on simplytest we're almost up. I decided to have them showcase their sites to each other, for the remaining time.

At the end of the meeting, I showed everyone the Drupal.org site, and also showed them WAMP, as a student had asked if there was a way for them to work more on a site at home, on Windows.

After the meeting, I reflected on what went well and what didn't, and I saw that my friends enjoyed how easily customizable Drupal was, right of the bat. I wish there had been a better way to show the installation process as well, but I think that would've required a dedicated server, and more preparation than I had time for.

All in all, I think the meeting went really well, and gave my friends a good introduction to Drupal and got at least a couple of them interested in installing Drupal at home to play around with it more.

Google Code-In

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