Author Nicole Tan (better known as ‘Nikki’) is a communications enthusiast from Singapore who holds the position of Sales & Marketing Executive at OlinData, a global training and consulting firm for open source technologies.

Together with the Pragmatic Lab, we co-organised the very first Hello Drupal training in Singapore on Friday, 14 June 2013, in conjuction with the Drupal Global Training Day.

We had a cozy room of over 20 people who simply just wanted to learn more about Drupal, with experience levels ranging from absolute Drupal beginners to others who have some CMS experience (be it Drupal, WordPress or Joomla).

Kicking off with a short introduction from Douglas who conducted the training, everyone was introduced to the basics of Drupal with the initial crucial step: signing up for Drupal Gardens and creating a very basic site. Douglas then dove into the basics of how to get the site up, how to edit basic areas of the site and the similarities between the Drupal core and Drupal Gardens.

Although Drupal has a steep learning curve, the hands-on training proved to be a great way to get everyone started, especially with some pizza and drinks to go along with it.

Judging by the smiles? We sure learned something, which only goes to show that there is a market for Web Experience Management and Open Source software in Singapore, as well as Asia.

And the best part of attending a good training vs. doing/learning it yourself is that you get to learn best practices from experts who have done it before, which is exactly why we are bringing the Acquia Drupal Site Building class to Singapore this August!

Images courtesy of the Pragmatic Lab.