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OpenDrupal / opendrupal-archived

The Open Drupal Curriculum. A set of free and open source training materials for web development & Drupal
http://opendrupal.org
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Use Gitbook for the Open Drupal Curriculum #30

Open hedleysmith opened 8 years ago

hedleysmith commented 8 years ago

The latest UK Drupal Apprenticeship scheme is underway with 24 full days of training over 2016 and there is growing interest in using the Open Drupal learning materials elsewhere.

So far, we've gathered learning materials in this repo as markdown files which has been working well to act as a central place to store everything, however finding, reading, and interacting with the materials could be improved significantly if there were a better way to display them, outside of GitHub.

I propose we use Gitbook which takes markdown files and turns them into nicely formatted online books. It comprises an open source tool and a 'freemium' hosting platform with a nice editor. I've prototyped how this looks here: https://open-drupal.gitbooks.io/curriculum/content/ - the foundation & main course materials are currently in one book, we could split this up into two repos & books if we wish.

On a related note I started prototyping a new site for opendrupal.org which included a way to display the learning materials by using the Harp preprocessor. I think it would be best to use this as a homepage and simply include a link to Gitbook for the curriculum / learning materials.

So, is GitBook a good idea to use?

ghost commented 8 years ago

i like the idea to use GitBook. I'm just discovering it, but the ability to output into both eBook reader formats is interesting. The editor isn't tied to the freemium offering and, given this is an open project and doesn't need to be private, I doubt the freemium version will be necessary.

The prototype site looks nice.

hedleysmith commented 8 years ago

@itsgreggmarshall thanks for the comment. Yes the freemium offering is only for when you want to host a private book which we'll never do so it's a nice match for us and we won't have to pay anything. There are a number of nice features that come with Gitbook as well as a plugin ecosystem and I would expect these features to improve and expand over time which will be a bonus.

ghazlewood commented 8 years ago

I discovered a great resource that is already using Gitbook to host a Drupal manual, Drupal Deconstructed (http://www.drupaldeconstructed.com/content/index.html). It's turning into a very nice resource itself. I also looked at Gitbook as I was interested to see how their manual was written. Seems like a great way to publish the course material.

hedleysmith commented 8 years ago

@ghazlewood thank you for the input, I read through some of Drupal Deconstructed when it was in a Git repo, nice to see it's being expanded and using Gitbook. A really great and interesting resource! Also a good sign if Gitbook is being successfully used elsewhere in the community