Workshop on Drupal 8 Web Development
5th – 10th June 2017
A Six-Day workshop on Drupal 8 Web Development was organized by DGI FOSS Center at Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida under the Spoken Tutorial Project of IIT Bombay during 5th – 10th June 2017. 17 students from CSE and CSIT Third Year attended the workshop which was conducted by Mr. Manoj Kumar Yadav, Assistant Professor - CSE and Dr. Aditi Paul, Assistant Professor-IT department.
Day 1: 5th June 2017, Monday
The first session of day-1 began at 9 AM with the introductory session by Mr. Manoj Kumar Yadav. He explained the brief history of Drupal 8 Web Development, its features and version control. Mr. Yadav also described the difference between web application by HTML and by Drupal. The main objective of this session was to make the students understand the versatility of Drupal 8 in developing websites and its huge community. Mr. Yadav continued his session by explaining the Installation Procedure of Drupal 8. He also helped students to install Drupal to their laptops with specific instructions like Administrator, user 1, authenticated users etc.
In the second session Dr. Aditi Paul explained the features of Drupal 8 application development software. She shared a short story behind the origin of Drupal and described how Drupal was first developed by two graduate students, Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder of University of Antwerp in 2000. Dr. Paul explained the content management features of Drupal 8 and helped students to execute the same in their laptops. She also explained the type of content like article, basic pages and how to create new content and display them on the site.
Day 2: 6th June 2017, Tuesday
Day 2 started with the tutorial on Content Type of Drupal by Mr. Manoj Kumar Yadav. He demonstrated to the students how to create content types in Drupal 8 and manage field. Students created their own content types according to their site topics. The session was very interactive and students got interested in developing the site.
Second session started with Content Management tutorial in which Dr. Aditi Paul taught the students how to manage the existing content of a Drupal site. She explained the Quick Edit options available in Drupal 8 which is a very useful feature in Drupal. Dr. Paul also explained how to change default logo and install own logo in existing content in Drupal. The students effectively executed the same on their Laptops. Dr. Paul also demonstrated Block Lay out in structure tab in Drupal which essentially defines where and how to place contents in a specific block in the development site.
Day 3: 7th June 2017, Wednesday
Day 3 started with the Basic Concepts of View by Mr. Manoj Kumar Yadav in which he explained the applications of view in Drupal 8. He explained how view can change the layout of Drupal content. Participants executed the view in their sites and modified the views of their development sites.
The second session was conducted by Dr. Aditi Paul in which she taught the students the Appearancetab of Drupal. The utility of Drupal 8 appearance is to use the default themes of Drupal 8 like Barteik, Sevenetc. She stated that the themes actually give the look and feel of the development sites. One can install new theme to change the appearance of one’s site. The session became very interesting when students tried to install new themes and encountered sudden compatibility error.
Day 4: 8th June 2017 Thursday
Day 4 started with an introduction to Taxonomy in Drupal 8 by Mr. Manoj Kumar Yadav. He discussed the features of taxonomy and where to apply it. Mr. Yadav explained that taxonomy is a basic structure to make table of related data for example if one wants to create a Course under which different branches come then taxonomy gives an easier way to create that. Students used the features for their own developments sites and added data to that.
The second session was conducted by Dr. Aditi Paul in which she taught how to insert a new image in newly installed theme in Drupal 8. She gave instruction to the students to change the images coming up by default in a theme and insert images relevant to the development site.
Day 5: 9th June 2017, Friday
Day 5 started with the web hosting in Pantheon by Dr. Aditi Paul. She taught the students how to create a Drupal 8 project in a free web hosting platform like Pantheon. She instructed the students to create free account in Pantheon and create a Drupal 8 project same as they have made on their local host.
Dr. Paul continued the session with the introduction to GitHub repository in which she explained the use of repository and its application. Students learned how to import an existing repository in their local host to a web control repository so that one can change and modify the code as and when required. The tutorial was crucial for the students to understand initially. They successfully created a repository in GitHub and clone a code file into that.
Day 6: 10th June 2017, Saturday
The last day i.e. Day 6 started with the final presentation of the web application that the participants developed during the workshop. Each of the application was analyzed by the instructors and modification was suggested. The session continued with a spoken tutorial online test on Drupal. The test was challenging and participants used their knowledge they gained during the workshop to answer the questions.
The top scorer was Vishal Jindal (CSIT VI) with 83% score.
The 6-Day workshop ended with a feedback session where students suggested to organize such type of workshop on a regular basis.