Custom fields have been around for more than a decade, and custom meta boxes nearly as long. Although, it can feel like they’re fading from usefulness in this age of Gutenberg, they still fulfill a very important role in information management in WordPress.

Providing an intuitive interface for your users is key to building something that people will actually want to use.

Let's take a look!

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We are excited to be a sponsor for the online, WordFest Live event this year! And, we'll write more about the event in upcoming blog posts, but in this first post, we wanted to spread the word about Big Orange Heart, the non-profit organization behind this free, global WordPress event.

The proceeds from the event will go to help support the organization's delivery of their services - services that since the pandemic have become even more needed worldwide.

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Millions of people around the world have lost their jobs in 2020, forced to stay at home, taking their knowledge and wisdom with them. In many cases, these people (maybe you?) could build an online course teaching the skills and knowledge you have. You can provide other people with skills they can use to better their own life, and make enough money yourself to not only weather 2020, but perhaps build a long term business.

To be clear, this isn’t working for someone else or being paid by an employer, but rather building something yourself leveraging what you already know. 

There are already hundreds of stories of people like Yoga instructors making courses and videos at home and selling access to them. Stylists, makeup artists, welders, cabinet makers; people from all walks of life can build their own website and teach what they already know.

This post will give you some real world examples of how people have built their own sites, and then show you what tools they used, so you can learn to build online courses with WordPress, teaching what you already know.

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We have a previous blog on how to make images background using CSS by Valentin Garcia, but we wanted to update and expand upon the topic.

In this post, we’ll talk about the background-size property and explore some other nifty background image properties that can help with our design.

Let's get started!

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It's one thing to carve the date in stone when you're beautifying a town in rural Indiana, but it's another thing if the footer of your Joomla website still says 2015. Well this is a problem we can easily solve. 

In this video, I want to talk to you about a fantastic plugin from Regular Labs called Sourcerer.  Sourcerer allows you to add code to Articles and Modules in Joomla including: PHP, CSS, and HTML. 

I've used this consistently for the last 10 years, and it is a terrific plugin, so let's go!

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There are many tasks in WordPress that are extremely repetitive. Things that get coded over and over again by developers, even though the result is the same every time.

Custom Post Types are a perfect example. The code to make them is the same in the end, it’s the settings that change each time. Taxonomies and meta boxes are similar. This is why tools like GenerateWP exist. You can simply fill out a form and get a fully functioning code block.

Another way to manage this kind of code is with a library. A library is a piece of code that knows how to generate that code the same way every time, accepting only a few settings to build what you want.

Following the Custom Post Types thread, there’s an excellent PHP Library from John Blackbourn called Extended CPTs. If you include it with your plugin or theme, you can simply add a few lines of code and get a full Custom Post Type. It can also handle Taxonomies. Another great example is meta boxes. They can be quite complicated, but a library can standardize the code and help remove errors.

BUT!  There's a bit of a problem. 

Let's dive in and take a look at the problem and the solution.

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Are you using Fabrik with Joomla? Are you familiar with the Fabrik Map Visualization?

Ok, Let's say you have a whole list of people/things or a membership list and there are addresses from those lists that you want to illustrate on a map. How can we do that?

It's super easy with a Fabrik Visualization, and I'm going to show you how.

Let’s go!

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To HTTP or to HTTPS your Joomla Site? There is no longer any debate on this age-old question, the evidence out there definitely says you should use HTTPS on all your websites, Joomla or otherwise, even if they don’t handle sensitive communications. Not only has HTTPS become a requirement for many of the new web browsers and progressive web apps, it provides security and data integrity for both your Joomla website and your users' personal information.

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Replacing the content on one article or even two articles on your Joomla website is pretty simple, but what if you have to replace the plugin code on over a thousand articles in your Joomla site? How would you do it? 

In this video, I'm going to show you how I replaced the plug-in code in over a thousand Joomla articles with a simple component from Regular Labs called DB Replacer.

Let's find out!

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A common complaint for many Joomla users is the editor that comes packaged with Joomla TinyMCE. In general, it’s a great editor, but Joomla Content Editor (JCE) makes it even easier for you to edit/add content with Joomla.

This blog post will show you how to install JCE and set it as the default Editor in Joomla. Also see how to allow different users to use a different editor than the default.

TinyMCE has improved the lives of content editors all over the globe. Joomla Content Editor (JCE) makes it even better.

Let’s get started.

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So you're working away on your Drupal site using Acquia’s DevDesktop just like we do here at OSTraining, and you want to take a snapshot of your site to use for another project. Or maybe you just want to keep a backup of it at a certain state in your Drupal site development.

In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to create Drupal site copy in Acquia’s DevDesktop.  It's really simple. 

Let's get to It.

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You are online because you want to be found by people over the internet. That is an assumption. However, it applies to most cases. 

To be found over the internet, your site has (is almost obligated) to be registered on at least one search engine - Google being the most important one.

You have to create an XML sitemap for your WordPress site and submit it to Google. There is a Google XML SItemaps plugin which accomplishes this task in a very user-friendly way.

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

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Today we're going to talk about Filezilla, and a really cool little trick that'll make your life much easier.

So have you been in Filezilla trying to edit your files whether they're php files or text files, and it always opens up in Notepad? It's really frustrating to find things, because there's no color coding.  Maybe you would prefer TextWrangler or Sublime.

Well, you can change that Notepad default inside of Filezilla so that it always opens up in your preferred editor. It'll only take you a few seconds to do this, and in this video I show you how.

Let's take a look.

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Sometimes you want to remove the /index.php from after your domain name or the category ID/article ID from your Category Blog or Category List menu items.

This blog post will explain how to do both.

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