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!