NoParrots Consulting

Parrot trying to steal my glasses in the Bali Petting Zoo

Sidharth Kshatriya — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:15:58 +0000

Photographs of the Feb 12, 2011 Batch

Sidharth Kshatriya — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:13:35 +0000

Here are the photographs of the Feb 12th Batch:

5 Day Drupal Training at Center For Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC)

Sidharth Kshatriya — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:53:09 +0000

I delivered another training programme at CDAC (Center for Development of Information Technology) under the Union Ministry of Information Technology. This time it was a 5 day training program and had a lot of students (see below). Its great to see the Indian governmental organizations take up open source software and slowly move away from static HTML pages to capable CMSes like Drupal

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Corporate training at Bechtel India

Sidharth Kshatriya — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 06:32:07 +0000

I recently delivered a 5 day Drupal Training Programme at Bechtel India. Bechtel is a multi billion dollar MNC in the Engineering and Infrastructure sector.

My training concentrated mainly on Drupal configuration during the first 4 days. On day 5 we did module development/theming training too!

During the configuration part of the training I explored a few topics more than I do traditionally. Panels was one such topic. Its simply amazing to use the new Panel Fields Row display style in Views. It allows you to avoid complex layout theming in views all together. Another interesting topic which I covered was using Views grouping and Views Charts to build attractive looking dynamic graphs.

Learn How to Make Websites in 2 weekends using Drupal! Fresh Batch starting Saturday, 11th June

Sidharth Kshatriya — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:48:48 +0000

Would you like to learn how to build sophisticated websites by yourself in 4 days (over two weekends)? If yes, come and learn with NoParrots.com Drupal training. For those who don't know already, Drupal is a world class technology used to make websites. Websites such as whitehouse.gov (The US President's website), mtv.co.uk(MTV's UK website) etc. are all made using Drupal.

NoParrots.com Drupal training is starting a fresh batch of classes for beginners on Saturday,June 11th, 2011. We will start with the absolute basics and steadily progress to more advanced topics. At the end of the course you would know how to build sophisticated websites without writing a single line of code. Only a basic understanding of computers is assumed. No programming experience is required for the course. To see what is going to be covered in the course go here.

Classes will be held:

Saturday, 11th June 2011, 10 am - 1 pm, 2 pm - 5 pm (6 hours)

Sunday,12th June 2011, 10 am - 1 pm, 2 pm - 5 pm (6 hours)

Saturday, 18th May 2011, 10 am - 1 pm, 2 pm - 5 pm (6 hours)

Sunday, 19th May 2011, 10 am - 1 pm, 2 pm - 5 pm (6 hours)

The training will have a total of 24 contact hours. Everyone is welcome to attend the Saturday 10 am - 1 pm session for free before deciding that they want to take the course.(Click on Read More for the rest of the article)

The price for the training is Rs. 5,000/- per head for individuals or small businesses. Corporate sponsored customers are charged Rs. 8,000/-. Please contact me at learndrupal [at] noparrots.com for more details or call me at 98718 44174.

The class will be held at our training center in Gurgaon. The training center is a 5 min walk from the Sikaderpur Delhi Metro Station (the Metro Line is now operational).

For more information please visit www.noparrots.com. To see a sample class video of mine please please go here.

Still have more questions? Check out the FAQ

Brahmacharis attend Drupal Training

Sidharth Kshatriya — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:41:20 +0000

Over the last few days I held Drupal training for two brahmacharis who had traveled all the way from Bangalore to attend my class. They help handle the IT requirements for their ashram and were looking to introduce Drupal on their ashram website. It was a pleasure to teach them as they were extremely fast learners and wonderful human beings.

Diverse Group of People Attending Drupal Training

Sidharth Kshatriya — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 07:15:12 +0000

People from a variety of backgrounds are choosing to study Drupal! In the past few weeks we have had people from the following fields attend our Drupal Fundamentals Course

Law
Non-Profit
Business
Journalism
Software

We have had students travel from Agra, Chandigarh, Dharamsala, Kathmandu etc. to attend our course! Come and enroll for our upcoming courses. Find out how Drupal can help make your killer website!

New Course: Introduction to E-Commerce and Ubercart in Drupal

Sidharth Kshatriya — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 05:25:23 +0000

NoParrots.com is excited to announce a new course! The course is titled "Introduction to E-Commerce and Ubercart in Drupal".

Ubercart is the e-commerce solution for Drupal. It allows you to build cart based shopping stores with all the power that Drupal has come to be known for. The first batch of this course was held on 30th September. The course assumes a basic knowledge of Drupal and is a 1 day course. Future courses in Ubercart will be announced from time to time. Please signup for our newsletter to get informed about upcoming courses.

Topics covered in the course:

What is a shopping cart based system?
Installing Ubercart
- Using the UberDrupal distribution
A survey of important concepts in Ubercart
- Checkout Pane
- Payment Form
- Catalog and Categories
- Product
- Shipping and Packing
- Taxes and Payments
- Order Status
Site wide configuration like store currency, units of dimension and measure
Customizing the Checkout Pane and Cart
- Customizing the address pane
- Tweaking various shopping cart features
Adding a new product
- Adding product attributes
- Overriding standard shipping charges in a product
- Product Features: Non shippable products like file downloads
- Creating Product classes
- Creating Product bundles i.e. Product Kits
- Importing Products from a comma separated file using Node Import
Installing a Test Payment Credit Card Gateway
Customizing Catalog
- Adding images to catalog categories (taxonomy images)
- Changing the grid layout of the catalog
Shipping and Taxes
- Understanding Ubercart Conditional Actions
- Creating Flat Rate, Discounted and Weight Based Shipping Charges
- Creating tax charges based on customer billing address
Reporting in Ubercart
- Viewing Sales Order, Customer, Product reports
Processing an order
- Packing an order
- Changing an order state
Brief Introduction to Ubercart Views

This whole course teaches Ubercart by building a simple store step by step that sells books, mobile phones and electronics. If you're interested in taking this course and would like to know when the next one is offered, please call me at 98718 44174 or contact me

Module Introduction: Special Menu Items

Sidharth Kshatriya — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:08:41 +0000

In this screencast we talk about the Special Menu Items module. This module allows you to create Menu items that don't link to some external/internal path. Its not possible to do this in a default installation of Drupal.

By creating menu items that don't link anywhere, you can create "placeholder" or "container" menu items whose only job is to group their child menu items.

Module Introduction: Views Dynamic Fields

Sidharth Kshatriya — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:28:12 +0000

Views Dynamic Fields is a useful little module that allows end users to select the fields they want displayed in a Drupal View.

This becomes useful in cases when you have a large number of fields but aren't interested in all of them at any given point of time.

In this video we demonstrate how to use and setup Views Dynamic Fields. We also use Views Bonus Pack to get CSV exporting ability.

Module Introduction: WYSIWYG Filter

Sidharth Kshatriya — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:42:49 +0000

Today, in this short 13 minute video I'm going to introduce a very useful module called WYSIWYG Filter. This module allows you to control the CSS properties (in your style attribute) and the presence of other attributes in the HTML tags in your content markup. Sample scenarios:

You want people to be able to use the float: css property in the style attribute but you don't want them to use the border-left/right/top/down property
You want people to be able to add the class attribute to the <img> tags but not to <p> tags

BTW this module does not require the WYSIWYG module to be installed.

Minor corrections and clarifications:

In the video I wrongly refer to the alt attribute of <img> as "alternate title"; technically its called "alternate text"
Enabling the float style will allow you to use float: left, float: right and float: clear. I don't explicitly mention that though. We are, of course, working with float: left throughout the example for <img>
It might be a good idea to adjust the weight of the WYSIWYG filter after enabling it so that it sits approximately where the HTML Filter did. I don't do it in the video above but in production site you would need to make sure that the order your filters ran was correct.

Mini Case Study: Creating a Bar Chart in Drupal

Sidharth Kshatriya — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 06:10:44 +0000

In this video tutorial I will build a Bar Chart in Drupal using Rules, CCK and Views. You'll have to have a basic understanding of these three modules to understand the video. Hope you like it!

Typo: My twitter handle is @noparrots and not #noparrots :-)

Arrive at our training center in the comfort of the Delhi Metro!

Sidharth Kshatriya — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:15:01 +0000

This is big news! Gurgaon is finally linked to the rest of Delhi through Delhi Metro! Till now we had a metro line that only went until Qutub Minar. It was not linked to the rest of the Delhi Metro Rail network.

As of September 3, the whole stretch between Central Secretariat and Gurgaon was open to commuters.

What does this mean?

Noida to Gurgaon travel is so much easier! So many prospective students work and live in Gurgaon. Now they can arrive well rested instead of having to brave traffic for hours!
West Delhi, Dwarka, South Delhi and North Delhi all are so accessible now!

My training center is a 4-5 minute walk from the Sikanderpur Metro station. The complete Delhi Metro System Map can be found here.

International Students attend No Parrots training!

Sidharth Kshatriya — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:02:51 +0000

In the recently held Drupal Fundamentals batch, I'm very happy to report that NoParrots had international students for the very first time! Two students flew down from Kathmandu, Nepal to get Drupal training from me. They stayed at the guest house that was barely 200ft away from my training center.

Some interesting topics that I covered, in addition to the usual ones:

Using Content Permissions Module to control field level permissions
Using Rules and Views Group By to make attractive charts in Drupal
Theming using the Skinr Module
External videos using the Embedded Media Field module
Multilingual Sites and Views (for the international students)
Drupal integration with Google Maps (for rest of the batch)

Drupal Training at C-DAC Delhi (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing)

Sidharth Kshatriya — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:06:53 +0000

This week I gave a 3 day corporate training program to C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) Delhi. C-DAC is the organization that gave India the PARAM series of supercomputers. There were 10 participants with a variety of technical backgrounds. For almost all participants it was their first brush with Drupal. Many have worked with OpenCMS, a Java based CMS.

The training had the usual concentration on Views and CCK. But since C-DAC does a lot of work on Indian Languages, it was also gratifying to to be able show off the powerful multilingual features of Drupal (through modules like Content Translation, Locale and Internationalization).

The written feedback and ratings I got from the course were great. Some highlights:

Many appreciated my efforts in making the course interactive.
- "Good mixture of presentation and exercises"
- "I liked the way you give training sessions as you make it interactive by giving live examples and [...] involve us in practicing on those examples simultaneously"
Many of them were totally convinced of the power of Drupal
I was overwhelmingly rated as Good or Excellent on various aspects of the training on the Feedback forms. Feel happy and humbled by the feedback.

Thank you friends for all the kind words of appreciation (and improvement suggestions) on my teaching!

I personally loved introducing Drupal to the C-DAC team. To see amazement in your eyes when I was showing off the power of modules like Views was so rewarding and satisfying!