Training Drupal at Jimma
The day after I arrived at Jimma it was time to start the training, a driver picked me up and dropped me at the University of Jimma where I met Girum, the ICT development Officer. It is his team I will give training to. We drink a coffee and discuss the program. It's a warm welcome and talk.
Day 1:
How to install Drupal.
The first part of the session was theoretically, I went over all the steps to create a Drupal site on a LAMP stack and went through the main anatomy of Drupal. Meaning, nodes, users, taxonomy, blocks and modules. It's a very long talk if you want to go over everything. So in the second session I made it more practical. Installing Drupal on their own portable was the task. Every trainee has a portable with Debian installed on it, so this was a good starting point. After creating a web folder and extracting Drupal on it, we could start with the apache and mysql configuration. Once that was done, the actual install of Drupal was possible. And by the end of the day everyone had a working copy. Not bad for a first day I think.
Day 2:
For day two, the main university site was used as starting point for explaining and adding new Drupal features. This was a good repetition of the first day, installing a Drupal, but this time we deployed an existing installation. At first the administration part of the site was revamped. Adding the administration menu and the Rubik theme made the admin already lots more user friendly. Also adding a WYSIWYG and IMCE for images, made the site more usable. For the second part of the day, we focues on SEO. Meaning installing and configuring Path, Pathauto, Nodewords, XMLSitemap and Google Analitycs.
Day 3:
On this day I had a first throw on custom modules. They wanted to know how to make a custom block showing the latest news items. After a rather chaotic explanation about hooks and module anatomy, a block with the latest news appeared in the screen. While we were on that topic, I was very aware that we were building something you could do with much less effort and a lot quicker. So I decided for the second part ot the day to switch to the Views module and explain it in detail. After seeing the power of this module, the direct need to create own modules was tempered. But could continue on that later, when the basics were known better.
As you can read, the training is a search between doing the needed and providing answers for needs on the main site. After 3 days, the knowledge and appreciation for Drupal was starting to grow and we could start with building a blog site as a project. But more on that on another post!
greetings from Jimma!
Some images from Jimma - Ethiopia
I wanted to share some pictures from the trip with you, there are some images showing Adis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia and Jimma, the city where the university the drupal training is taking place.
You can find more pictures here
Arriving at Jimma
It was a long and tiring flight To Jimma. I left Saterday in Antwerp at 4 PM ( CET +1 ) to arrive Sunday in Jimma at 12PM local time ( CET +3 )
I had to take two flights, from Brussels to Addis Ababa and from Addis to Jimma. The first flight made a stop in Paris, so that meant 9 hours of sitting at the plane seat. Once arrived in Addis, I had 5 hours to kill before I could board the plane to Jimma. At least, that's what I tought... When I checked in almost 4 hours later, I had to board immediately! Ow, I forgot about the hour difference :S I almost missed my plane! But I still got it and arrived in Jimma as planned.
I was picked up at the airport by a staff member of the Jimma University. The greeting was very warm, and so was the weather ;) I was dropped of at the Jimma Central Hotel, where I could check in and get some rest and prepare for my first day of training. I was exhausted, I slept 2 hours at most at the plane.
So I enjoyed the rest of my Sunday at the hotel, on the terrace, in the sun, next to the swimming pool! For those who wonder, it is indeed the complete opposite with the rest of the town, which is rather poor and misses lots of things we take for granted in Europe.
More to come soon!
Preparing for Jimma
A few months ago Jean-Marc asked me if I would be interested to give Drupal training in Ethiopia. Without asking further information, I agreed immediately! And now Saturday, it's finally coming. Of course, in the past few months I did gather the extra info. At the University of Jimma I'm gonna give training to the the ICT Development Office and ICT members from colleges. The initiative for the training comes from UGent, who has several training tracks in co-operation with VLIR-UOS. We will be splitting the training in two phases. A technical track and a usage track. And this spread over two weeks A non-exhausting list of topics in the training:
- Installation
- Server configuration
- Development and production environment
- Security
- Drupal install
- Drush
- multisite
- multi language
- contributed modules
- Views
- CCK
- Community
- SEO
- Profiles
- Build your own module
- How to start
- Hooks
- Form API
- Services
- Security
- Drupal theming
- Templates
- Regions
- CSS
- JS
- Drupal 7
- Site management with Drupal
- Create content
- Taxonomie
- webforms
- Media
- User management
- users
- roles
- rights
- Blocks
As you can notice, it will be a rather busy agenda. Well, I'm fully preparing for my departure now. My flights leaves Saturday at 17h40 CET from Brussels Airport. And I'll arrive at Addis Ababa (Ethiopian capital) 6:20 AM. This still puts me about 330km from Jimma, and the quickest way is an national flight. I'll arrive Sunday in Jimma at 11:55 AM. And what happens next? We'll see. But I'm excited to find out!More info at:
