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Rough transcript:

Welcome to an audio edition of Drupal School, I’m Elliott Rothman.

You may be wondering why there is no video in this episode, and that is because I just wanted to get an announcement out to all of you who watch the podcast.
First off, I’d like to thank our contributers who have donated to Drupal School, I sincerely appreciate it, and encourage anyone who hasn’t, to at least consider it! Of course there is also the Drupal Association which accepts donations that pay for the development of Drupal, and events surrounding it. You can find more about that at association.drupal.org

I’d also like to thank everyone who has emailed me with suggestions, posted comments on the art lab website, and helped each other out.
You may have noticed there hasn’t been an update in a few weeks on the site, and I was hoping to get some time to do a few more soon, but things have been rather hectic lately. With that said I wanted to make an announcement that there probably won’t be another new episode for a little while as I’ve got a lot of other commitments going on right now. This is hopefully only temporary, and I’d like to address a few more tips on themeing, having a site go live, as well as some work flow tips soon.

This doesn’t mean Drupal School is going away however, just think of it as Season 2 coming to a close! With Drupal 6 coming around the corner, you can expect a slew of videos to accompany it.
With that said, I thought I’d toss a few great resources out there that might be of interest to everyone.

The first one is on CSS. Weather you’re a seasoned pro designer, or a new themer, check out David Sawer McFarland’s CSS: The Missing Manual. I’m currently helping someone I know learn CSS, and this book is an excellent place to start, it only assumes basic knowledge of xhtml, and addresses different browser issues, and is tutorial based, with other easy to read passages. I definitely picked up a few tricks along the way. You can find out more on that at sawmac.com

Another great resource is Lynda.com, which, if you’re unaware, is an excellent video tutorial resource. Subscriptions start at $25/month which will give you unlimited access to all the videos for a variety of topics. One in particular that caught my eye was PHP Essential training by Kevin Skoglund of pixel and press. It assumes only basic xhtml knowledge and walks through many of the fundamental concepts of PHP, introduces MySQL interactions, and walks you through how to build your own simple content management system. Again, you can find that at lynda.com and the title is called PHP Essential training.

Of course when you’re up to speed on PHP, run out and grab a copy of Pro Drupal Development by John VanDyk and Matt Westgate. This book might be a little over the head of someone new to Drupal without any backround in PHP, but for anyone who is interested in learning how Drupal works on a much more technical level, and is interested in building advanced themes and modules, this is a must have! You can get this at amazon.com/prodrupaldevelopment, and it’s about $30.

Before I go, I have a little for anyone who’s ever had to add a lot of content rapidly to a Drupal site. It’s so simple I can’t believe I wasn’t using it before! Bookmarks! If you find yourself repeatedly clicking, administer, create content, page, over and over and over again, just bookmark the page where you create that type of content. On an older computer such as my laptop this saves a ton of time over time, and I was adding so much content at one point to a particular project, I actually was in tune with how long it would take my local server to process that link and in the meantime would tab over to fill in the information on another node. Might be overkill for most people, but if you’re adding hundreds of nodes, this can be a real time saver!

Well that’s it for this episode, thanks for listening, and I estimate I’ll only be gone for a month or so, so around September expect Season 3 of Drupal School to start back up again.