PHP for Drupalistas
This spring Emma Jane and Lorna Jane were chatting about PHP and Drupal and workshops and came to the conclusion that Drupal developers were not necessarily equipped for Drupal 8. With all of the Drupalisms in the Drupal code, it can sometimes be difficult to implement code that is both a Drupal best practice and a PHP best practice. While there are many workshops on how to teach PHP developers how to Drupal, there were no workshops teaching Drupal developers how to PHP. Until now!
My theory is that most developers working with CMSes like Drupal think they don’t know much PHP … but of course they actually know quite a lot! The newer versions make more use of OOP and new PHP features, but nothing that’s really rocket science (although the symfony components are very nice). This course is a chance for us to give a more solid grounding to those skills that developers just pick up along the way, and give some time to master those skills in a safe environment.
The course is taught virtually (Emma’s in Canada and I’m in the UK so it’s my afternoon and her morning … hoping that we can fit lots of other people into that slot too). Seats are sold to companies, who can send as many devs as they think should be on the course. We’ll be teaching this in two half-day slots, on 20th and 27th September.
Our goal in running this course is to share the knowledge we have to as many people that need it. Emma’s a Drupal expert, I’m a PHP expert, so expect a bit of hilarity as we translate for one another. Once we have reached our goals in terms of attendees, we’ll release our training materials for anyone to use – other organisations, including training providers, will have access to our materials.
To find out more about the course (at this point you could still book a place as well, but you might need to be quick!) and the topics we’ll be covering, take a look at the site http://phpfordevelopers.com, and let me know what you think!
In my experience most people “using” Drupal know just enough PHP to be extremely dangerous.
I’ve seen a lot of projects suffering from people experience this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect which I’ve had to go in and clean up on several occasions.
Jeremy, I’ve definitely seen that but I’m not quite prepared to come out and say it’s a majority. Definitely I think there’s skills we could share from the PHP world over to the Drupal community and I am looking forward to doing that. I do realise this might be the result of my relentless optimism and perhaps I’ll have a different view once I’ve tried that more :)