Workshop: PHP for Drupal Developers

This spring Emma Jane (that's me) and Lorna Jane were chatting about PHP training and Drupal workshops. While there are many workshops on how to teach PHP developers how to Drupal, there are no workshops teaching Drupal developers how to PHP. Things change radically again in Drupal 8 as we bring in PHP 5.3 (yay! namespacing!) and Symfony2 (read the comments on this old post to get a sense of how "excited" the Drupal community was; read the issues on d.o to see things that are being done that are Symfony-related).

So it's all very exciting, right?

But what if you're a developer and you've got a billion contrib modules (*cough*davereid*cough*eaton*cough*)? Well if you've got a billion modules, you're going to need a lot of help to review your code and see what can be updated. And if you've only got a few modules you aren't necessarily going to have been knee deep in the refactoring muck and you won't necessarily know where to start.

That's when Lorna and I hatched a plan.

Lorna Jane is a PHP expert. She's not a Drupal expert. She knows how PHP works when it's not full of Drupalisms. (She also happens to be one of the organizers of Symfony Live in London. and right now she's at OSCON giving talks on PHP language features and writing awesome APIs.) In September, Lorna and I are going to teach a workshop to help Drupal developers see their code through PHP eyes, and not just Drupal eyes. We are seriously excited about this workshop.

The workshop will cover object oriented programming, design patterns, Symfony2 and new language features as of PHP 5.3 that some Drupal-focused developers may not be aware of. It will be conducted online, with two real-time events (September 20 and September 27).

Awesome, right? This is where it gets really awesome....

Right now I'm in the process of open sourcing my flagship workshop, PSD to Theme. And I had this Oprah moment where I was like, "And you get a car! and you get a car!" and all of a sudden it occurred to me that this workshop should be open sourced too. (It took me about 11 seconds to convince Lorna Jane that this was a good idea...which is about as long as it took me to say it out loud.)

To fund the development of the workshop, we're doing it kickstarter style. Registrants know exactly what our goal is (help developers to level up for Drupal 8; and open source amazing, and relevant workshop content), and we know what our funding targets are. Instead of selling single seats to individual attendees, we're working with companies who have 5+ developers who need training and selling a single "company" seat (with "unlimited" participants per company). This allows companies to send as many developers as they think will benefit from the workshop. There are 25 company spaces available...and a few of these are already tentatively booked. (Hint: there are more than 25 Drupal shops. Hint, hint: open source means that companies offering *training* may want to be part of this as well.)

You can read more about the program at its micro-site: PHP for CMS Developers.