Description: Come and join this course if you're looking to learn about the latest techniques in web development. According to .net magazine 47% of web developers want to learn AJAX next, why not get ahead of the competition and learn it now!!
With Open source content management systems it’s extremely easy to create and manage robust corporate websites, blogs, online communities and more. Come and learn how to set up, maintain and customize these kind of systems.
RSS has become the best way to share your site with
the world, and keep the content of your website fresh. Join us and learn how to develop, maintain, and publish RSS feeds on your own website!
Outcomes: Students will be able to:
- Set up and maintain a variety of web sites using Drupal.
- Load and display content using Ajax.
- Fix the back button when using Ajax.
- Write an RSS 2.0 feed in XML.
- Parse and display RSS feeds with PHP.
Prerequisites: - Basic XHTML
- Basic Javascript
- Basic PHP
- Basic XML
Resources:- Overhead projector
- Lecturer workstation with G5 Mac, internet connection, and PDF reader.
- Web server with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and a minimum of 100 MB of space.
- Student workstation with G5 Macs, and internet connection.
Student Demographic:- Students who have had courses before in web development.
- Developers that are self taught.
- Age range: 18 - 35: This age range have the best chances of successfully learning all the skills taught in this course.
Assessment: The evaluation of the student will be divided in to a practical project (70%), a practical exam (20%), and class participation (10%). The practical project consists of a website created with Drupal, it can be a blog, social network, corporate or personal site. The site has to have either an Ajax powered image gallery or must have and Ajax powered content browser. The site must be uploaded to the internet and must have an RSS feed, and some RSS content must be parsed and published in the site with PHP.
The progress of this project will be presented on the last lecture, and it will be due two weeks later. The practical exam will be to be able to create a navigation system with at least three pages with an Ajax script provided by the lecturer. The lecturer will always be encouraging in class discussion, and that combined with the multiply blog you must maintain during the course will count for class participation.
Teaching Styles: This course will take a constructivism approach, building upon subjects that students have already studies. For example Drupal is PHP based so it will be easy for the students to understand it, Ajax is written with Javascript which the student has already learned, and RSS is just a format for an XML document which again the student is familiar with. This course will benefit greatly tactile learner, since most of the evaluation is done through practical methods. Visual learners will find the lectures easy to follow wit
h the detailed slides available, also if a student is absent he can do the lecture at home follo
wing the slide. Auditory learners will benefit from the in class discussions, and all lectures will be recorded with a voice recorded and be available online as an mp3.
Structure: 10 lectures of 90 minutes with 15 minute break.
Duration: 10 weeks. Starting the 30th of July, 2007, and ending 1st of October, 2007.
Times: Mornings: 10:30 - 13:30 / Evenings: 18:30 - 19:30
Location: SAE Institute, Creative Media Lab
Lecturer: Nicolas Borda
Drupal: Topic List:
- History & meaning
- Advantages & disadvantages
- Installation
- MySQL setup
- Configuration
- Adding modules
- Customizing your site
Ajax: Topic List:
- History & meaning
- Advantages & disadvantages
- Saying Hello! XMLHttpRequest
- Loading content asynchronyously and displaying it
- Fixing the back button with jQuery
- Simple site navigation
- Image gallery and special effects
RSS: Topic List:
- History & meaning
- Advantages & disadvantages
- Installing and using RSS reader (Sage)
- Writing XML files in RSS 2.0 format.
- Parsing RSS feed with PHP and publishing them in your site.
