Why an Online Workshop?

• Online Workshop Summits mean no travel hassle!
• Bring the experts live to your desktop!
• Time spent on the road is better spent instead with family, friends or in the office!
• Sessions are developed to dive deeper into the material!
• Ask questions directly to the speakers!

About Drupal Workshop Day

The Workshop Summit Series lets you build your skill set without having to leave your computer. Each Summit is a virtual conference—all you need is a computer and broadband internet connection to attend.

The Drupal Workshop Day consists of two 3-hour sessions spread over one day. Attendees can chat with each other and ask questions of the presenters throughout the day.

Registration for The Workshop Summits are now open!

The Drupal Workshop Schedule

March 29, 2010 - Monday:

• 9:00 a.m. - 12 noon CT - Setting Up, Customizing Drupal with Tom Geller

Wait, a Virtual Conference? How Does That Work?

Once you are registered, you will receive a follow-up email with a reminder about the conference schedule and other helpful details.

On the day of the conference, you will receive an email invitation about 45 minutes before everything starts. Click on the enclosed link to sign in and enter the virtual meeting space. Once you are signed in, you’ll be able to see and hear the presentations as they happen, ask questions as needed and chat with the other attendees if you like!

Technical Specifications: to attend The Summit, you will need a modern web browser (Firefox 1.5, IE 6 & Safari 2 or newer, for example) and a recent version of the Adobe Flash Player. Follow this link to run our system diagnostic (opens in a new window). It will let you know right away which plug-ins, if any, you will need to update before the event.

Still have questions? We don’t blame you. Contact us at e4h@heatvision.com if there’s anything else you’d like to know.

About Our Speakers

Sheena Donnelly

Coming from a background of literary criticism and graphic design, Sheena began her career in web design in 2007.  Her obsessive attention to detail and insatiable curiosity lead her to quickly hone her technical chops and span the gap between designer and developer.  Since her introduction to Drupal in the Fall of 2008, Sheena has designed, built and themed dozens of Drupal sites, lead several presentations on Drupal theming and co-organized the Triangle, NC Drupal User's Group.

Sheena's goal is to encourage good design in Drupal through designing great themes, outreach and education for non-Drupalist designers and working within the Drupal community to make advanced theming easier for non-programmers. 

Online: sheenadonnelly.net

Tom Geller

Tom Geller has been building Web sites since 1995. He switched to Drupal in 2007, and currently maintains three Drupal sites: inoberlin.com, gellerguides.com , and tomgeller.com.

He's the author/presenter of over 12 hours of video training from Lynda.com and the forthcoming Peachpit Press book, "Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide".

He's instructed college-level courses and on-site training, and has given presentations at ISPCon, Macworld, the Consumer Electronics Show, Bay Area Drupal Camp ("BADCamp"). He splits his time between San Francisco and Oberlin, Ohio.

Online: tomgeller.com

Christopher Schmitt (your emcee)

The founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm, Christopher is an award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993. As a sought-after speaker and trainer, Christopher regularly demonstrates the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He is Co-Lead of the Adobe Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in addition to being a contributing member of its Education Task Force

Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites and CSS Cookbook, Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web, and Web Reference.

Online: christopherschmitt.com | twitter | facebook | flickr

About The Sessions

Drupal Workshop sessions run the gamut from beginner through more intermediate/advanced content. 

Setting Up, Customizing Drupal

Drupal is the best way to create a Web site with modern features such as polls, blogs, forums, comments, and content revisions... and it's free! But first you have run a path littered with obstacles to get it up and running.

Tom Geller, author of Drupal training materials for Lynda.com and Peachpit Press, shows you how to vault those hurdles to install and configure Drupal on both a home computer and a remote server.

Topics include:

   * Setting up Drupal's environment on a Mac or Windows computer
   * Downloading and installing Drupal
   * Changing your site's basic look and feel
   * Saying your piece: Creating and manipulating content
   * Controlling users (so they don't control you)
   * Creating a flexible layout with blocks
   * Enabling and using Drupal's hidden features
   * Finding and installing great extensions ("modules")
   * Five modules you must install
   * Updating and maintaining your site
   * Backing up and moving your site
   * BONUS (if there's time): Roll your own content types with CCK
   * BONUS (if there's time): An introduction to complex data display with Views

When you're done, you'll have a fully functional web site, built on the same software that runs such diverse sites as those for The Economist, Sony BMG Music artists, Ads of the World, ... even The White House!

Prerequisite skills

Attendees should have basic computer skills, including the ability to navigate Web sites, download and uncompress software, and move and edit text files. *nix skills are helpful, but not necessary. Before the course, Mac users should download MAMP from http://mamp.info/ ; Windows users should download WAMP from http://www.wampserver.com/ . (We'll walk through their installation during the course.)