Case Study: Teaching TYPO3 to Newbies
Lars Jensen, AaTUG from Aarhus has made the following experience from teaching TYPO3 newbies in April:
Considerations before the session:
A good idea as a start to teach people, who have only limited knowledge of TYPO3, is to ask them to read the fairly short document Modern Template Building part 1 (MTB part 1) before participating in a teaching session. Reason is that MTB part 1 is a pretty mature document, which contain just enough to get around typoscript, extensions and html templates. Also people being familiar with the TYPO3 BE interface is definitely an advantage.
At the last user group meeting it was agreed that installation procedures was not to be the point of this teaching session. We considered it a timesaver to supply people with logins to a working TYPO3 server. Also installation is pretty easy with the 1-2-3-Go procedure even though installation troubles some people.
Description of the session:
The session was pretty straight forward. At first I explained thoroughly how typoscript, extensions and html templates work. And while explaining I was showing the process (on a computer) of configuration and administration in the making of a html template in conjunction with the auto parser.
While explaining I didn't follow the the MTB part 1 completely "after the book" since people had read it. Instead I made some changes of the process shown in MTB part 1, just to show people that there's different ways to complete a TYPO3 site. In fact people seemed to understand the approach in MTB part 1 pretty easy.
As the session went along we discussed cObjects from the TSref and some alternative settings in setup and constants fields. We also discussed how to make front end design using typoscript and implement different cObjects inside the html template using uploaded ressources etc. How to use the TSref was also discussed and among other things we looked at wrapping, stdWrap, cObjects.
Afterwards people got their laptops spinning and decided which level of interaction with TYPO3 they could handle, then they tried TYPO3 themselves and I was asked a lot of questions. Just like a normal session we know from school :) Some people only made a html template for the auto parser, others got a little website up and began to look at TSOB and static template themselves :) It all went just fine.
Considerations after closed session:
Afterwards I was left with the impression that MTB part 1 was a good approach for teaching people to configure and use TYPO3 very quickly. It obviously helps to meet other typoheads in real life. And nomatter what skill level each person has, everybody can contribute with their own experiences to the benefit of others. I also noticed that this meeting made people go to a much higher skill level in just one day than it would have been possible to do themselves at home.
In my opinion MTB part 1 is a very good document and very easy for newbies to understand. If there's a lot of people attending a session. And with different skill levels among people. The session could be split up, so smaller groups could concentrate on a more specific subject. Time span: The time used to go through all the above was around 5-6 hours (though including eating a big 3 menu chinese duck dish :)
Lars Jensen, AaTUG
