“Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data” video series is out!

At last I can announce the release of my new six-hour video series from Lynda.com, “Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data“, which you can check out with a free one-day pass. (Of course it’s also available to anyone with a Lynda.com subscription, starting at $25/month for all-you-can-stand training in over 600 topics.)

I first talked about this course in January and was able to implement at least one suggestion from your comments (about creating calendars). There are also videos about mapping, charting, and preparing data for tabular export, all built on a foundation of CCK and Views.

Since Lynda.com’s audience is mostly graphic designers, the course starts out with an in-depth description of data structure: As you know, data planning is at least as important as implementation! And it’s an essential subject whose subtleties elude most beginners.

One wag in IRC questioned the need for such a course. “Presentation of Data?,” he said. “Isn’t that what Drupal does anyway?” He’s right — in the same way that a car is a tool for going shopping. But I believe that many people who would benefit from Drupal’s data-presentation features simply don’t know about them, because their knowledge of it stops at Stories, Pages, users, and blocks. They need a bit more information to make the leap, and could become fierce advocates for Drupal when they see all it can do in this area.

Extra bonus: For giggles, check out the Introduction video, which includes some live-action video of me looking goofy. 🙂

Thanks, as always, to the Drupal community for both helping me to understand these topics myself, and for making Drupal the Web development powerhouse it is.

11 replies on ““Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data” video series is out!”

one-day-pass?
Hi-

I am new to drupal and wanted to check out this one-day-pass…ths link doesnt work?
Has it expired?

The link works
The link does seem to work for me. Try again, and good luck!

By Post Author

Available on DVD?
Tom,

Will this be available on DVD like Drupal Essential Training? It’s nice to be able to watch the tutorials even when I’m somewhere that doesn’t have Internet access.

Jon

Yes (they say)
Hi, Jon. I’m told that it’ll be available on DVD, but don’t know when, or what the price will be. Believe me, I’m eagerly waiting for it, too!

By Post Author

There won’t be a DVD
I was recently told that Lynda.com is not planning to release a DVD of this series. 🙁

By Post Author

Problem with the video series
Tom,
I am currently going through your series but am stuck on Altering a view’s appearance through CSS. It seems you jump into this video with a new page-view created (that was easy in fact it made me look at everything and make sure I could do it) but you update a file called local.css and I understand what you are doing to it but you say it is referred to before in the series and is put into the notgarland directory and so on. I must have missed where we did this new notgarland theme and also the updating of the .info file can you help me out here.

Steve

Part of the video was cut out
Steve:

Wow, you were the first to catch this error!

I looked through the video’s original script and see that it originally walked through duplication of the Garland theme, creation of the .info file, and so forth. Many of these videos came to 13+ minutes when complete, and had to be cut way down: It appears that the editors removed a fairly important part. Oops.

Here are my notes from that section — I hope they help. I’ll also let the Lynda.com folks know. (By the way, the best way to get such matters addressed is to file a bug with them through your Lynda.com subscription.)

We could just go in and edit our theme itself, but we’re going to do it the safe, correct way. We’ll make a copy of our theme so that, if anything goes wrong, we can roll back all our changes, with no harm done.

[Change “Page for family” display to Grid style]

[Duplicate Garland theme into /sites/default/themes: NotGarland]

[Change .info file first lines. Add local.css.]

By this I mean to change the line:

; $Id: garland.info,v 1.5 2007/07/01 23:27:32 goba Exp $

…to read “notgarland.info”, etc. (Actually, I’m not sure this step is necessary, since this is just packaging information from drupal.org. But better safe than sorry, eh?)

Then change:

“name = Garland” to “name = NotGarland”

…and add a line before:

stylesheets[all][] = style.css

that reads:

stylesheets[all][] = local.css

[SWITCH TO NOTGARLAND THEME]

I hope that helps!

By Post Author

I am currently going through
I am currently going through your series but am stuck on Altering a view’s appearance through CSS. It seems you jump into this video with a new page-view created (that was easy in fact it made me look at everything and make sure I could do it) but you update a file called local.css and I understand what you are doing to it but you say it is referred to before in the series and is put into the notgarland directory and so on. I must have missed where we did this new notgarland theme and also the updating of the .info file can you help me out here.

Couldn’t quickly find it myself, but…
Hi, A?k — thanks for writing. It’s been a long time since I made (or watched!) those videos, and couldn’t quickly find where I’d referred to it in the series. But briefly, here’s the line you want to add to the .info file:


stylesheets[all][] = local.css

One thing I also can’t remember: Whether Drupal automatically knows to include “local.css”: If so, this line is unnecessary. But if you put it in, it should work in any case. Good luck!

By Post Author

Comments are closed.