Last week I attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference for the first time since 2011. I was very impressed with the organization and the the content of the conference, it was great to see how the community has evolved over the years.
Along with Tim Nafziger, I co-facilitated a discussion session for members of the NTEN/Nonprofit Drupal community. We had an excellent group with a wide range of people participating, from newbies to agency owners. Our two main topics were how to get started learning to use Drupal, and what the future of Drupal holds. The latter topic is hard to summarize, but suffice to say there are still a wide range of opinions about Drupal 8. Even more than 2 years after it’s release, there are still 4 times as many sites using Drupal 7 as Drupal 8.
As for learning Drupal, we had many great suggestions. One person shared this cartoon illustrating that rather than the typical “learning curve,” figuring Drupal out is more like climbing a cliff. But when you get to the top you can really kick butt.
So, here are our suggestions for scaling that cliff!
- Free and paid tutorials at http://drupalize.me
- Create a sandbox to play in at http://pantheon.io
- Contribute in the issue queues https://www.drupal.org/novice
- Meet your local Drupal user group (DUG) https://groups.drupal.org/
- Global training days https://groups.drupal.org/global-training-days-2018
- Stack Exchange https://drupal.stackexchange.com