Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Training

  • WordPress Super Survival Skills Course Cape Town

    My First Independent WordPress Course – Cape Town

    I’ve finally mustered up enough motivation to launch my own independent Public WordPress Course in Cape Town. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages since I’ve been teaching WordPress Development since 2008 privately, within companies and on behalf of Friends of Design Cape Town.

    It a litte, ok maybe alot of prodding from Faye Elliot, one of the delegates who attended my WordCamp Cape Town Presentation last year. I have to say a big thank you to Faye as I was making up all kinds of excuses why now wasn’t the right time. It’s amazing what an enormous effort it can be to get a small little course up and running especially when you have to find an additional 4 or 5 hours in an already jam packed schedule.

    Lot’s of Interest in the WordPress Course

    I hosted a Free Introductory Presentation to the course this evening at my favourite Coffee Spot, Escape Caffe in Bree Street Cape Town. We has a few people attend, not massive turnout but everyone present registered to take the course so it’s starting off with a bang already.

    We’ve secured a great venue at 200 on Main Claremont. Appropriately at the Executive Wellness Centre’s Gym Studio so I’ll be putting the WordPress students through their paces. There’ll be a few punching bags lying around when the code starts getting to your head.

    A Quick Outline of Course Modules:

    WordPress Newbie Bridging SessionDate: April 121 SessionR350
    WordPress Site AdministrationDates: April 16,192 SessionsR600
    HTML & CSSDates: April 23, 26, 30 & May 3, 75 SessionsR1600
    WordPress Theme CodingDates: May 10, 14, 17, 21, 245 SessionsR1600

    Venue

    200 on Main Building, 198 Main Road, Claremont, Cape Town – (Executive Wellness Centre Studio)

    Times

    6pm – 9pm

    You can tell your spouse you’re going to gym and you won’t be lying

    For Full Details & Registration Visit the Course Info Page – http://www.the-colab.com/wordpress-course-survival-skills

  • My First WordPress Tut on wptutsplus.com – WordPress Training Wheels

    I’ve been teaching WordPress theme development for the past few years, not an extremely advanced curriculum, but the nuts and bolts. Yesterday I had my first tutorial published on envato networks new wptutsplus.com site. It’s great to see your work published in recogonised spaces. I hope to roll out at least another 8 – 10 of these tuts covering all the basic to intermediate aspects of building basic WordPress themes from scratch.

    One of the important aspects of the course is the Learning theme which I’ve labelled Training Wheels. It builds from a simple HTML template, and over the next few lessons will grow to contain all the major functions and templates required of a fully fledged theme. The Template will be fully commented to facilitate a slow transition into understanding the purpose of each WordPress function added to the HTML.

    If you’ve got HTML skills and have been wanting to learn WordPress Theme development this is gonna be just the tutorial series you’ve been looking for. I personally struggled from the beginning with tuts that merely dump huge chunks of code on you and say, “Paste Here”. This is going to be a step by step guide.

    I’m also working on setting up my offline WordPress Theme Development course located at wpbedouine.com.

  • WordPress 2.7 Admin Guide

    On a recent project which involved some training on administering wordpress sites, I was required to develop some documentation for using wordpress. The target group had never even heard of wordpress before, so the documentation had to be written in a very simplistic manner. Just thought I’d share it here in case it benefits anyone else, it’s a little rough, though I’m sure some of you might find it useful.

    WordPress 2.7 Admin User Guide

  • Proud of my XHTML & WordPress students’ progress

    I’m so proud of the guys who have taken my basic HTML course I have been teaching at Friends of Design college in Cape Town. Friends of Design is a hip new design & web college based in Cape Town. They have quickly made a name for themselves and I believe are set to change the way students launch themselves into the creative & web industries.

    I’ve never taught a formal class like this before and it’s been a challenge, though a really rewarding challenge. The course is one of the reasons for my slow blogging of late.

    I’ve just completed teaching a 3 week evening class covering HTML & XHTML basics as well as CSS. The cool thing is I never studied html, so this time around I had a chance to learn a few lesser known html thingies I never even knew existed.

    Learning while I  teach

    The course covered everything from the starting <html> tags through to <div> layouts. I had to cover a few areas like table layouts which I absolutely hated but helped the students get a good idea of how and how not to use tables. After completing the unit covering accessible tables & forms I started gaining a newfound respect for these 2 areas of html which I had a really bad relationship with previously.

    Other challenges which helped me with my own HTML skills, were the questions and problems the students would bring up which forced me to dig a little deeper into the subject. It’s quite a humbling experience when a newbie comes up with a problem you have no idea how to fix and you still need to teach them how to go about trouble shooting the whole thing. More often than not it’s a really small issue like a misplaced closing tag or some or other character out of it’s proper place. This is where colour coded editors like dreamweaver and text mate come in handy. I find my students are really lost without the colour coding as it clearly allows them to distinguish between html, comments and php codes.

    To help give the students a more detailed resource I had to do some scouting around and found sitepoint’s code references for both HTML & CSS which are of the best reference resources on the subject for beginners. I found the WC3 pages way too ugly and academic in their approach to teaching html.

    Student Work to be proud of

    libertadHandre v.d Merwe is one of the students who has show exceptional talent. He has progressed to the point of launching his site(www.libertad.co.za) a few days after the HTML module was completed. He’s already quit his job “not my doing”, and is well on his way to entering the world of web development.

    The challenge of teaching WordPress development

    My class has 6 students and we have currently moved into the next module which is 4 weeks of wordpress. I don’t know of any other wordpress courses running locally, and one of the main challenges was setting the curriculum and developing a process to take the students through from scratch.

    My students have never been exposed to wordpress before this class, so we started with an overview of what a cms is, then into specifics about what wordpress is.

    I’m hoping to wrote a text book which should be completed by the end of the 4th week but so far it’s been slow going with all my other commitments.

    Some of the basic principles of how wordpress works have proven to be huge challenges to explain to students who have only just recovered from a blast of HTML, XHTML & CSS. There were a few things i thought would be extremely simple to understand that I struggled to get across. This part has been a real growing experience for me in terms of teaching.

    The exciting thing is last night we started converting the students’ html templates from the first module into simple themes and loaded them up live.

    At the end of the course I hope to post the students’ portfolios and help them find some gigs to start them on their way to a new career in web development.