OSTraining Blog Post and Tutorials

Joomla! 3.2 is about four months away and there's another really big and exciting feature in development: Content Versioning!

That's right! Content Versioning! And it's not just content versioning for the Joomla core, but an API will be provided for extension developers to use the feature for their extensions.

In this article, I'll take you through a little bit of the background information, then get right to the screenshots through the Content Versioning system, its current UI (User Interface) and its features.

As per DrupalCon tradition, Dries gave the opening keynote address at DrupalCon Portland.

There were no major announcements in this keynote, although Dries did announce that the first alpha version of Drupal 8 will be released in Portland.

Instead Dries laid out a vision for where the web is headed and how Drupal 8 can get there. 

There's a video of the keynote below. For those without an hour to watch the whole presentation, I saw three major themes in the keynote and added some brief comments on those themes.

It's day three for Steve and I at DrupalCon Portland (we taught the Absolute Beginner's Guide to Drupal on Monday).

This morning's keynote is by Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane), a user experience and design expert. Her topic is "Thriving in a World of Change: Future -friendly Content with Drupal".

The session guide says: "In this session, Karen will explain how Drupal is the future of adaptive content. She's not saying that like she's some kind of Drupal fangirl (though she is.) She's saying that as a long-time information architect, content strategist, and user experience designer, who sees content through the eyes of the people who create it and maintain it. She'll explain why—from her perspective—Drupal's content modeling tools and flexible UI make it a powerful tool in our fight against the future."

When Drupal 8 launches sometime in early 2014, one of the many new features built into the core will be a WYSIWYG editor.

In our teaching experience, the lack of a WYSIWYG editor has been the most common user complaint about Drupal.

I attended a session today by Nathan Haug, one of the key people behind making this a reality.

1. You'll be able to turn off the editor, but it defaults to on when you first install Drupal.
2. The editor used will be CKEditor which provides many robust, features including in-line editing, and its a good fit for the Drupal "way" of doing things.

Here at OSTraining, we split our time between online and live training.

Today we merge the two types of training in a new course called "WordPress Custom Content Types".

Earlier this year, we held a live training class in Michigan. For three days, Topher taught a small group of attendees how to code with WordPress. We filmed that class and it's ready for you to watch online.

Topher uses custom content types as a chance to explore WordPress coding in general. 

Topher starts by explaining how plugins work and the correct way to approach building them. He then explains content types by creating two: one for staff members and another for the departments they work in. Along the way, Topher touches on everything from how to use the WordPress codex to shortcodes, hooks and custom taxonomies.

If you want to start coding with WordPress, you need to watch "WordPress Custom Content Types".

The problem with many software applications is you can't make them your own. With Drupal, however, you have the option to override how Drupal does things. From altering a form to customizing the way your pages are displayed, Drupal provides options.

The concept of overriding something in Drupal can be made reality in several ways: Drupal's APIs, theme overrides, as well as overriding default configurations in modules. Whatever it is you need to do, the number one rule you should endeavor to follow is: don't hack the core (or a contributed module). Don't open the code files in Drupal and change them to meet your needs. There are better ways.

In this tutorial, we will focus on overriding themes.

About a week ago, my Twitter stream was overtaken by just one topic.

I follow people who work with many different types of web software. That day, they all had one thing in common. They were all tweeting about Ghost, a new blogging platform that was raising money on Kickstarter.

Ghost has no live demo and it's heavily based on two fairly obscure tools: Node.js and markdown.

However, it flew past it's Kickstarter goal inside one day and has now raised over £100,000.

Why is the idea of Ghost so popular with so many different people? Because it promised a renewed focus on simplicity. The truth is that in 2013 even web experts want simpler software.

Accessible websites allow users with disabilities to navigate the web and access information. A disabled user may be blind, have a motor disability, dyslexia, or a range of other disabilities that make web navigation difficult. Most users with disabilities will access the web using adaptive equipment, such as a screen reader or refreshable Braille display. Many will not use a mouse.

And these disabled users make up around 10-20% of Internet users in most countries, so creating websites with them in mind will have a positive effect on your bottom line.

A time consuming task for all software users is testing.

It takes time to find all the download links, to set up a test environment and to install all the additional software you need.

Simplytest.me is an ingenious solution for Drupal. Simplytest.me will install Drupal sites for you, as well as modules and themes that you want to use. Here's a brief introduction to this very useful site.

If you exclude the core plugins, All in One SEO Pack is the most popular WordPress plugin of all time, having been downloaded over 14 million times.

All in One SEO is so popular because it appeals to both beginners and experts.

For beginners, All in One SEO works out of the box with very little configuration needed. Also, as the name implies, it eliminates the need for multiple plugins because it contains many key features such as handling metadata and installing Google Analytics.

For experts, it offers a lot of flexibility for setting up your metadata and integrates smoothly with a wide range of other extensions.

We covered All in One SEO back in 2011. Here are 2 new videos tutorials to get started with All in One:

Joomla 3.1 is now available.

3.1 is available as a one-click update for all Joomla 3 users.

The major new feature in 3.1 is Tags. We wrote a detailed introduction and said that Tags "is one of the best new features to be added to Joomla in a long time."

In addition to Tags, there are some bug fixes and 7 security fixes, so we recommend that Joomla 3 users update immeadiately. If you have a lot of sites, try using Admincredible.com to update quickly and easily.

CSS is a simple language. It allows us to style properties of HTML elements using selectors. This makes it easy for beginners to get started with CSS.

However, as the size of your web projects grow, you end up repeating much of your CSS code. If you face this issue, then it's time to use a CSS preprocessor.

In this tutorial, we're going to explain what a CSS preprocessor is. We'll also introduce you to one of the most popular CSS preprocessors: LESS.

Moving a Drupal site to a new location on your server is surprisingly easy.

There is a simple 3 step process to move a Drupal site from one folder to another. In this tutorial we're going to show you those 3 steps.

If you'd like to move a Drupal site to new folder, we recommend using the Backup and Migrate module.