Advanced Drupal
Sharpen the visual aspects of your site-building skills and learn the power of Drupal
This next level Drupal course takes a deeper dive into the range of blocks and custom styles available on Western's Ashlar theme. The Advanced Drupal course continues where the Beginning Drupal course left off and leaves lots of room for individual questions about your specific site. In this Teams-based training, the trainer will work with you individually, or with others, to share best practices for controlling the look and feel of a website and how to use resources like pattern lab and material fonts. Plus there is lots of hands-on training for building and implementing complex blocks, custom styles, custom blocks, content types and more.
If requested, we can explore how content types and views work together to decrease manual updates and improve accuracy of content over time.
Prior knowledge of Drupal site building or completion of the Beginning Drupal course is helpful. (Western's standard accessibility course is required.)
For the Best Training Experience
To get the most out of this online training, it helps to have access to high speed internet with the following hardware:
- Desktop computer with one or more monitors. Laptops work fine, but can be more challenging to navigate on.
- Mouse
Upcoming Courses Date and Time
Advanced Drupal classes are held on demand. Please sign up as noted below and we'll schedule as needed.
Sign up for the course
To sign up for the advanced Drupal Course send an email to web.help@wwu.edu that includes the following:
- Your name
- Your department
- Website URL you expect to work in
- Three (or more) items you wish to learn, or complete, on your website. Your list can include any of the items listed from Course Highlights if you are interested in learning about those items
If you know when you completed the accessibility training or Beginning Drupal course, please include this as well. (This saves us the step of emailing you back to ask if you've completed the prerequisites.)
The Advanced Drupal Course may include:
- Discuss the complex blocks available on the Ashlar theme including accordions, announcements; banners, and the whitespace block.
- Discover how to apply custom classes for styling blocks; including margin spacing & block padding.
- Build and place custom blocks for creating content once, displaying in multiple places. Discuss when, where and how to use them to save time/improve accuracy.
- Best practices when building tables - using header rows, guides and resources for code.
- Creating custom URLs for pages.
- Customizing material icons for Announcements, or use in other blocks.
- Q&A for specific questions you may have about your site.
We could also go over an introduction to Content Types and Views. Specifically how these components work together in Drupal to increase content accuracy and decrease manual work, as well as how to determine if a content type or view is worth the time/effort of building for your site.
Feel free to bring any questions or specific changes you may want on your department website and we’ll try to answer them at this session.
The participants in attendance are what dictate the final course content. Please let us know 3-5 things you'd like to learn and we can add it to the course, or develop a new course around the topic.
Drupal Team Training
If you and one or more team members would like a customized training, we now offer Drupal Team Training. All members of your team must complete the required accessibility course, and the online, canvas-based Beginning Drupal Training before requesting a team training. There is a 3-person minimum participant requirement.
We'll find a date and time that works for you and your team and dive in focusing on the specific elements that apply to your website, including custom content types. If you and your team have a specific project in mind, please email web.help@wwu.edu with details so we can offer the best solution and craft the appropriate training for your team.
Beginning Drupal Training
Just stepped into a position where you make website updates and want a greater understanding of what Drupal can do?
This online beginning Drupal course will give you the tools to use layout builder to create webpages that are accessible, responsive and help your audience find what they need. Learn from the ground up how to build or edit your Drupal website using Layout Builder.