Teaching Drupal's "Big Five"

I teach Drupal to a lot of people. One thing I have learned, is that whether I'm teaching people who are so new that they're still learning how to pronounce "Drupal" or I'm teaching current users the intricacies of the Migrate module, there's one common thread: without a solid understanding of Drupal's "Big Five", students will have trouble gaining the confidence that all Drupal developers, themers, site-builders, and anyone else who interacts with Drupal on a daily basis need.

The "Big Five" came about while I prepared materials for the Drupal Career Starter Program's (DCSP) second go-around (we're now accepting applications for our fourth session). I realized that I needed to name the milestone that I felt all of our students needed to attain before moving on to more advanced material. It didn't make any sense to introduce modules like Views or Panels, let alone introductions to module or theme development if students weren't solid on fundamental concepts.

The "Big Five" gives a name to the goal that students learning Drupal need to strive for, along with a mental checklist and milestones that give them a sense of accomplishment and confidence as they progressed. Providing a mechanism for students to gain confidence as the course progresses is something that I continue to focus on in both our long-form courses as well as our full- and half-day workshops.

If you're reading this, then you're probably not going to be surprised by the "Big Five" (in no particular order):

• Content types
• Users/roles/permissions
• Taxonomy
• Blocks/regions
• Menus

So, how is the DCSP designed to teach these concepts in a way that makes them second nature to our students? The curriculum starts off with simple concepts and examples, each one designed to encounter a hurdle that can be solved with something from the "Big Five". For example, in one of the first lessons we create a new "basic page". Once complete, like clockwork, at least one student will ask, "but how do I link to this page from the main menu". Boom. We have a question with a solution that allows us to (semi-)naturally introduce Drupal menus and menu items. By cleverly designing exercises that lead to moments like this, the "Big Five" are almost always introduced as a solution to students' queries.

Of course, repetition plays a key part in hammering home the importance of these fundamentals. With the DCSP, we have the luxury of having five weeks that focus on topics that I feel everyone involved in Drupal site-building should know backwards and forwards. We are constantly revisiting/reusing concepts involving the "Big Five" over these five weeks, adding a small bit of complexity (usually in the form of a contribued module) at most opportunities.

The final piece in the puzzle is encouragement and confidence-building. By referring to the "Big Five" and their importance at every opportunity, we try to create a situation where students can gauge their own progress along the path by mentally checking off which of the "Big Five" they have confidence with and which ones they need to focus more time on. I encourage students to teach each other - if one student isn't understanding how to link a vocabulary to a content type, rather than explaining it myself, I'll ask one of their fellow students to explain it. This usually kills two birds with one stone - one student learns, the other gains confidence. Often, the student doing the explaining does a better job than I do since their knowledge is new, and they've just had the experience of learning the particular concept.

Teaching Drupal's "Big Five" in a full- or half-day workshop is challenging. There's barely enough time to give each topic it's due, and providing opportunities for repetition can be challenging. For our full-day workshops, we normally limit the course material to just Drupal core and some indespensible modules. There's no doubt in my mind Drupal 8 will make this easier for both instructors and students.

DrupalEasy provides public and private, online and in-person web-development career training and professional development workshops on topics from the basics of HTML and CSS, Responsive web design, fundamentals of Drupal site-building, the Views module, data migration into Drupal, as well as module and theme development. Contact us for more information, or check out our list of available workshops.