Lesson 02: Coding Standards, Keeping code clean

Class will convene again this Thursday at 8pm EST (GMT -5). We will gather in #drupal-dojo, get on a worldwide Skypecast and fire up an improved screen-sharing application to do our lesson. We will also take time to debrief the work so far, talk about what we'd like to do going forward, and answer misc questions about the group and about Drupal.

The Lesson Plan:

1. Sound Check: make sure everyone can get on Skype and is in IRC
2. Debrief: talk about how we've been doing, about moving the regular lesson time to Sunday and/or starting other times
3. Drupal Coding Standards: what they are; why they matter
4. Keeping Your Code Clean: where to put stuff; how not to kludge
5. Keeping Your Code Safe: how and why to use Drupal functions for text, links, input fields and database queries
6. Making Your Code Intelligible: the Tao of commenting
7. Dojo Challenge!: review a patch for Drupal 5.0
8. Documentation: lets keep the great documentation coming!

Feel free to comment on this post with feedback. I'm especially interested in collecting links to documentation folks may want to read ahead of time, and/or we should look at improving as a result of this lesson.

See you in the Dojo!

Lesson 01: Drupal Basics, FormAPI, and CCK

After some discussion in IRC, it seems that there's definitely interest in having "lessons" here at the Dojo. Ideas range from HowTo on specific features or topics to having creators of interesting sites lead the group in an under-the-hood tour. Really, the sky is the limit.

It is with this intention that we will try and make lesson-time be a recurring weekly feature. To that end Josh will run the first few sessions. Hopefully within a couple weeks we will have a format that works and other experts can step in/step up.

For the first lesson, we will try to cover the basics: drupal terminology and what it means, the basic module hooks, good coding style and best practices.

Since this is of high value to all dojo members -- and it's a lesson that should be repeated many times as new developers join -- we're also going to try and create good documentation out of this. A primer for new Drupal coders, so to speak.