How to Make Drupal “Work Smarter, Not Harder” aka An In-Depth Look into the Advanced Trainings Offered at DrupalCon Portland

So, you’ve got quite a bit of experience with Drupal, but some functions just aren’t working for you. There’s got to be a way to make Drupal really work for your needs. The Advanced Trainings being offered at DrupalCon Portland can help you do just that, whether it’s with creating modules, integrating Node.js with your Drupal site, or even just making sure your website design is responsive for all platforms.

These are considered “Advanced” trainings, so make sure you do have a higher level of experience with Drupal than just a beginner. We’ve got some awesome trainings available for the “beginner” Drupal user.

The “Drupal 7 Module Development” training relies on hands-on experience to help you learn how to solve functionality issues with your site by building custom modules. With this advanced training, you will gain valuable insight into aspects of development that extend beyond module creation such as how the trainers work on a daily basis to think through and solve complex problems. It’s as much about problem solving as it is module development and you can’t go wrong with that! Intermediate developers with basic Drupal + PHP knowledge will also benefit from attending.

Your instructor for this training is Jody Hamilton, the co-founder/CTO of Zivtech. Jody leads the development team, architects projects, writes modules, and provides consulting and development training for clients. She has delivered this training numerous times around the globe. It has been presented at DrupalCon Munich, DrupalCon Denver, DrupalCon Chicago, DrupalCon Copenhagen, and DrupalCon San Francisco. Just know that you are in good hands for this training with someone who knows what she’s talking about.

Looking to create a real-time application on your site or add an interactive experience on your site, but you have no idea how to do that with what you’ve got with Drupal? Look no further than the advanced training, “Integrating Node.js and Drupal”. Coming from the chefs over at Four Kitchens, this training will teach you, through hands-on experience, how to write your first node.js application and how to integrate node.js into Drupal.

Node.js is one of the fastest growing software projects in recent memory. It’s fast, scalable, and has a large ecosystem of contributed packages. It’s perfect for lightweight, real-time data intensive applications. Drupal is the world’s best Content Management System, but for applications like Chat, live-blogging, streaming data, realtime widgets, or games, it sometimes isn’t the best choice available. By combining both Node.js and Drupal and using them for their strengths, it creates the best product available to you.

As for the aforementioned “brains” at Four Kitchens, they include Elliot Foster and Mike Minecki. Mike and Elliot have worked together for years, which has allowed their training styles to merge and allow them to work well together and be able to speak to the “uber-nerds” and beginner “nerds” with ease. They both have extensive experience building applications that combine Drupal and Node.js including a real-time commenting system, a responsive web game, and some very high volume feed processing systems. The range of implementations provide a diverse background that allows them to provide insight into the various ways that Drupal and Node.js can be used together. There are some course prerequisites, so be sure to check them out.

As with the other Advanced Trainings, the “Advanced Responsive Web Design with Sass + Compass” will have you working hands-on with Sass and Compass so you can best familiarize yourself with both tools. While Drupal was originally designed to build websites, the web continues to grow and the number of devices used to access the web is never-ending. Because of the increasing number of devices used to access the web, it is vitally important to make sure that your site can meet the needs of everyone that uses it. This is where Responsive websites come in because they allow each web browser to make critical decisions about display and behavior rather than prescribing one solution for everyone.

With this advanced training, you will learn how to build a responsive website focusing on the use of the CSS Preprocessor, Sass, as well as the Sass Framework, Compass. There are prerequisites for this advanced training, so be sure to review them before registering.

This training has three experts, Sam Richard, Chris Ruppel, and Ian Carrico, to make sure that you get the best experience available. Sam works as Sr. Front End Developer at NBCUniversal, while Chris and Ian work at Four Kitchens as Frontend and Backend developers, respectively.

If you’re looking to really push the envelope on your Drupal knowledge-level, then be sure to check out the Advanced Trainings available at DrupalCon Portland. If you can learn to make Drupal work smarter, so you don’t have to work harder, then why not do it? The trainings available at DrupalCon Portland can allow you to work smarter, not harder at any level. Be sure to check out all of the trainings available and make the web work for you!