Hello Drupal – Utrecht, The Netherlands
For one of the first ever ‘Hello Drupal’ events held in the Netherlands that was organised by OlinData and co-organised by One Shoe (who graciously let us use their beautiful building in the centre of Utrecht) , we had around 10 people gathered for an introduction to Drupal!
After the initial kickoff (with a few latecomers, of course), we started with a short introduction about ourselves and the different companies involved in this Hello Drupal event. We start every training with such an introduction round as it is very important to know what kind of people we are teaching (in this case Drupal).
The group consisted of Drupal beginners (which is what the ‘Hello Drupal’ event is geared towards, mainly those who have heard of Drupal and/or experimented with Drupal Gardens. This course usually attracts people who have experience with other Open Source systems like WordPress and Joomla. Therefore we started off with a comparison between these systems and explained the pros and cons of each system to give our beginners a clearer picture of all the different systems.
With all the guys set up and ready (unfortunately no women had signed up), we dove into Drupal using Drupal Gardens and that proved to be the perfect way to show the basics of Drupal: it is easy to sign up and to create a Drupal website. People tend to understand the concept better and faster, when they are shown the similarities between the Drupal core and Drupal Gardens.
As Drupal is not the easiest Open Source system to learn, the use of a SaaS (software as a service) system provided the necessary tool to kickstart the learning experience.
After a lot of slides, coffee and lunch, we finished the first ‘Hello Drupal’ event where the attendees had their first experience of creating content types, views and customising a theme.
Upon hearing that one guy even travelled from Belgium just to attend a free basic Drupal training session in the Netherlands, you just know that more training is necessary in Europe to get more people interested and informed about such Open Source solutions.