The OSTraining Blog - Web Design News and Tutorials

How to Create Magento Attributes for Products

When you first set up a Magento site, your products will have a price, a weight, an image and some other popular e-commerce options.

However, these options won't be enough for many stores. Different products have different needs. Here are some simple examples:

A book store will require fields for the Publisher, the Date of Publication, and the ISBN number.
A clothing store may require fields for Type of Fabric, Clothing Size, and Clothing Color.
A car store may require fields for Engine, Body Type, and Miles Per Gallon.

Magento allows you to add all those details through the use of "attributes". In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use attributes in Magento.

This guide is taken from Magento 2 Explained, the best-selling book for Magento 2. We use the example of a store called "Orangeville" in that book, so you'll see it referred to here.

The OSTraining Podcast #27: Alex Kuczek on his Journey from Poland to Silicon Valley

5 years ago, Alex opened a web design agency in Poland. This summer, Perfect Dashboard, his SaaS company, was accepted to Berkeley SkyDeck, one of the most presitigious start-up accelerators in the world. How did Alex travel so far so fast?

In this episode, Alex tells us about his journey. We also talk about the different approaches to work in Europe and US, plus raising money for WordPress businesses.

How to use Search API Solr Search in Drupal 8

Apache Solr is a very popular open source search platform, based on the Java Lucene Library. Solr is very stable, scalable and reliable and provides a wide set of core search functions. Solr creates an index of the available documents and then you can query Solr to return the most relevant ones for your search.

For Drupal users, it is possible to integrate your site with Solr. The Search API Solr Search module (yes, that name is a mouthful!) provides a Solr backend for the Drupal Search API module.

This tutorial will deal with the integration between Drupal and the Solr platform. Before you begin, you will need to have installed Apache Solr on your server.

Your Ultimate Tutorial for the WPML Plugin

WPML is the most popular plugin for multi-lingual WordPress sites.

WPML is an acronym for "WordPress Multilingual" and the plugin is installed on nearly a million sites.

In this tutorial, you'll see 6 videos that introduce you to WPML and show you how to configure it correctly.

Videos to Get You Started With WordPress Plugin Development

My client has asked me to build a WordPress plugin for them. Help! How do I learn to build WordPress plugins?

That's a common question we get from people who join OSTraining for the first time. They want to know about the skills they will need, and what kind of classes they should take.

I'm going to show you the skills needed for WordPress plugin development. I'll also give you links to start learning those skills.

The OSTraining Podcast #26: Jason Cohen on Why WPEngine Belongs Next to Adobe and Oracle

Jason is the founder and CTO of WPEngine. Jason and his team recently celebrated WPEngine's inclusion on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the first time.

If you don't know what Magic Quadrants are, this is the episode for you! If you do know about Magic Quadrants, you'll still learn a lot! If you want some background, check out our post "Your Plain English Guide to Magic Quadrants".

If you've seen Jason talk, you know he's an insightful and fresh thinker. In this episode, he convinces me that WPEngine deserves to be listed alongside Adobe and Oracle. He also explains why you should stop using the phrase "Managed WordPress" for WPEngine.

The Beginners Guide to Magento Blocks and Widgets

Blocks and Widgets are the key layout features in Magento. These two features are very closely linked, and are often used together.

One way to think about Blocks is that they are mini-Pages. A Block can also contain text, images, video and more. But because Blocks are smaller, you will see them around the edges of your site. Blocks are often inserted into headers, sidebars and footers.

However, Blocks are placed using Widgets. First you create a Block, and then you use a Widget to decide where that Block will be displayed.

Let's walk you through some examples and show you how Blocks and Widgets work in Magento.

This guide is taken from Magento 2 Explained, the best-selling book for Magento 2. We use the example of a store called "Orangeville" in that book, so you'll see it referred to here.

Build Your Shopify Store in 1 Hour

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the world.

For under $30 per month, Shopify offers everything your store needs from products and variations to payments and shipping.

We've just published a free, hour-long introduction to Shopify. Rod Martin shows you how to build your store in just one hour. This video is free to watch on YouTube!

Special offer: If you're starting a new shop, get a .STORE domain name for your Shopify site! It's the perfect TLD for your eCommerce site. Use the coupon "OSTSTORE" and you'll pay just $4.99/year. Get started here.

The Beginners Guide to Understanding Magento Taxes

Taxes are never fun, whether you're paying or collecting them.

However, when you're running an eCommerce store with Magento, Taxes are an unavoidable headache.

We're going to try to explain everything in plain English, but there's no getting around the fact that taxes are hard work.

So, sit down in a comfortable chair and make yourself a strong cup of coffee. Let's explore how taxes work in Magento.

This guide is taken from Magento 2 Explained, the best-selling book for Magento 2. We use the example of a store called "Orangeville" in that book, so you'll see it referred to here.

Build Multilingual WordPress Sites with the Polylang Plugin

One of our customers recently asked us how to set up a multilingual WordPress site to manually translate it. The Polylang plugin does just that.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Polylang plugin to create a multilingual WordPress site from scratch.

Email WordPress Users When a New Post Is Published

You write great content and want to build up an audience of people who read your blog regularly. In this situation, there's no better way to keep your audience up-to-date than by email.

Here's how you automatically notify users whenever you write a new post. We're going to use the free features of the PublishPress plugin.

Your Plain English Guide to Gartner Magic Quadrants

A few weeks ago, WPEngine purchased StudioPress. This was a major move in the WordPress space. This also seemed like a simple move. One of the biggest hosting companies was taking over biggest theme developer. More customers, more money, more growth.

But I'm part of a popular Slack channel for WordPress developers and I saw was confusion. WPEngine said they purchased StudioPress to become a "DXP". That was unexpected. Lots of the terminology used to describe the deal was new to the developers:

What is a DXP? A DXP appears inside a magic quadrant?!?

In this guide, I'll try and explain DXPs, magic quadrants, WCMs and more. What does this jargon mean? How do these phrases help explain WPEngine's acquisition of StudioPress, and other big moves made by open source companies?

The Ultimate Tutorial for Drupal's Paragraphs Module

Over the last few months we've worked with more and more Drupal 8 sites. Those projects all had one thing in common ... they used the Drupal Paragraphs module.

Paragraphs is a very popular module for handling content in Drupal 8.

Paragraphs works in a similar way to content fields, but also provides a wide range of options for the design, layout and grouping of your content.

If you want to learn Paragraphs, this is ultimate guide! Read, watch and follow along with all 10 parts of this tutorial. By the end, you'll be using Paragraphs for all your sites too!

Videos to Get You Started With WordPress Theme Design

How do I get started with theme design?

That's a common question we get from people who join OSTraining for the first time. They want to know about the skills they will need, and what kind of classes they should take.

Here's an overview of everything you need to get started with WordPress theme design.

Introducing BoldGrid, the WordPress Website Builder

The new Gutenberg editor is nearly here and the WordPress landscape is about to change in a big way.

Many plugins are themes are going to be impacted. In particular, people are curious how page-builder plugins such as Beaver Builder and Visual Composer will respond. The answer, looking at BoldGrid, another popular plugin in the same niche, is to do more. BoldGrid doesn't just build pages, it builds complete websites. It allows you to build an entire WordPress website without any code and in a ridiculously short amount of time.

BoldGrid provides layouts, themes, an SEO plugin and more. It also has developer-friendly tools such as Staging plugin and a Backup plugin. All-in-all, it offers far more than BoldGrid will ever offer. It's a website builder, rather than a page builder.

The Magento 2 Explained Book is Here

Do you need to build an eCommerce site with Magento?

Today, we're delighted to say that the "Magento 2 Explained" book is here.

This step-by-step guide will get you up-and-running quickly with Magento 2.

Magento has a reputation for being a complex platform, but we've successfully explained similar software before with Drupal, Joomla and MySQL. This 300-page book is a fun and straightforward beginners guide to Magento 2.

Join today and get access to 1,000's of books and videos. Learn WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla and more! Sign up today!