Course description

Once you try Drupal 8 you definitely don't want to go back: out of the box, you can create and maintain sites in Drupal 8 with unprecedented efficiency and robustness. But what about working as a team? Or dealing with that tech-savvy client who wants to be able to occasionally modify configuration on a production site? Or keeping your own configuration on your local development copy without propagating it to the production instance? Or automating a tedious manual task? The day-long course focuses on describing best practices on how to structure the codebase of a Drupal 8 project with Composer, manage configuration, automate tests with unit testing and Behat, and be able to work effectively in different scenarios, ranging from the lone developer to a big team. We will see what is available, the concepts behind it and practices coming from real experience with Drupal 8 projects.

Learning Objectives

Participants will get a comprehensive overview of best practices in Drupal 8, especially Composer, automated testing and Configuration Management, and will learn how to:

• Structure the codebase of a Drupal 8 project with Composer
• Take advantage of Configuration Management in Drupal 8
• Ensure that no regressions occur thanks to automated testing (unit tests, Behat)
• Work faster by using Drush and Drupal Console
• Keep track of all changes to a website
• Work in a distributed team with no risks of overlapping during development
• Reuse components and settings

Materials will include slides, printed handouts for participants, cheatsheets for quick reference.

Syllabus

The course is divided in modules. Each module will be structured as a presentation with slides, a brief session for general discussion/questions and assisted practical assignments.

• Preparing a codebase
• An in-depth look at Configuration Management and the Configuration API
• Automated testing in Drupal 8
• Using Drush and Drupal Console
• Working in a team
• Advanced Drupal 8 workflows

Who will gain the most from this course?

The ideal target are intermediate developers with some Drupal 8 experience who want to use in a clean and effective way all the popular tools that can help in developing Drupal 8 projects. Advanced Drupal 8 developers will find the course useful too.

Prerequisites for this course

A good familiarity with the Drupal 8 basic concepts (installation, content types, Views) will be assumed; some familiarity with the command-line and git, even unrelated to Drupal, will help in understanding the potential benefits better. It is recommended that attendees bring their laptops to the course. Trainers will take care of executing practical tasks slowly enough for everybody to understand without the need for attendees to replicate actions on their laptop. Those attendees who already have good Drupal development skills and a local development environment ready may replicate the exercises on their laptops during the training. All code will anyway be distributed to students so that it can be kept for future reference.

Dev Environments

The course will be extensively tested on Mac and Linux. Windows users are expected to be able to follow everything, but they will need to have a good shell environment installed, preferably with a working git, composer and drush.

Course Information

Date: 26 September 2016
Time: 9:00 - 17:00
Cost: €553.50 early bird rate (through 26 August), €615 regular rate - includes light breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks
Training Company: Nuvole
Trainers: Andrea Pescetti, Antonio De Marco, and Fabian Bircher
Experience Level: Intermediate
Drupal Version: 8.x, 8.1x, 8.2x

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