This week we continue to update our training for the new Gutenberg editor.
"Your Introduction to WordPress Plugins" is a guide to WordPress plugins now that Gutenberg is here.
These videos will show you how to find, evaluate and install the best plugins for your WordPress site. You'll see plugins for SEO, planning content, eCommerce and more.
You can test out all the plugins thanks to the new OSTraining sandbox sites.
One OSTraining user asked us this week if it was possible to schedule a revision to go live in the future. This would be very helpful if you need to automatically update a Post on a future date.
This is possible in WordPress thanks to a plugin called "Revisionary". Revisionary is the plugin for managing WordPress revisions and this is one of it's most useful features.
Now that's done, you're ready to create a scheduled revision. Please note that you can only do this with content that is marked as “Published” status.
WordPress 5.2 is out now and it brings several useful new features, both large and small.
One of the nice small improvements is the ability to disable unwanted blocks. By default, WordPress arrives with dozens of blocks and every time you install a plugin, there's a chance that the plugin will add many more.
If your site ends up with hundreds of blocks, your writing interface will be slow and confusing. Here's a preview of all the block areas, even in a default WordPress site:
WordPress has its own built-in search facility. This works fairly well, but it doesn’t let you make any changes to its standard settings.
If you want a search facility that searches only specific sections of your website or if you want to exclude some pages from the search you will need a plugin.
The Field Permissions module in Drupal 8 allows you to set permissions (enter, edit or view) on a Drupal field, based on the role the user belongs to.
In order to demonstrate how this module works, we are going to create a content type called "Essay" for the website of a school.
There will be 2 roles:
The Freshmen permission will not be allowed to choose the subject of the essay, whereas the Sophomores will have the possibility to choose between literature and history. However, there will be no possibility to change the subject once a student has made a choice.
Let’s start!
If you want to place flex-items in a particular sequence inside their flex-container, independently of how they are placed in the HTML code, you use the CSS Flexbox order property.
As you already learned in the first tutorial of this series, you can invert the order of the flex-items using row-reverse on the inline axis. This is useful when using right-to-left languages like Urdu or Hebrew.
It is also possible to invert the order of flex-items on the block axis using flex-direction: column-reverse.
The order property gives you much more flexibility because it allows you to visually change the order of each item and still keep the source order in the markup (HTML code). This is very useful for people, who use screen readers (accessibility is important).
Let’s take a look at an example.
There are a lot of ways to translate your WordPress site.
You can use an automatic translation widget such as Google Translate. You can use a fully-featured plugin such as WPML. You can use a professional translation service such as Acclaro.
However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a translation service as slick as Weglot.
Weglot is a WordPress plugin that connects to a SaaS service. It will translate your site automatically and then allow you to fix any mistakes in the text.
The flex-basis property sets the initial length of the flex-items inside a flex-container.
You can think of it as an improved version of the width or height values. That is, flex-basis has always prevalence over width or height.
This tutorial will demonstrate this concept with an example. Let’s start!
One of our customers implemented an iframe on their website. They right away bumped into a layout issue.
This was very typical of the iframe tag. It often creates more problems rather than solving them.
Breaking design is not the only issue with this tag. In this blog post, you will learn the three main reasons why we strongly advise against using the iframe.
If you use WordPress in a professional way, you've probably come across Zac Gordon.
Zac is an enthusiastic and charming teacher who focuses on JavaScript in WordPress. He borrowed the phrase "Learn JavaScript Deeply" from Matt Mullenweg and he made it into his personal slogan. For the last several years, Zac has produced video classes, online conferences, live talks, and podcasts that focus on teaching you how to use Javascript in WordPress.
We recently partnered with Zac on a book, "React Explained". That book is available now. It's a fun and enjoyable introduction to React, which is the JavaScript framework of choice for WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and thousands of developers.
In this week's episode, I'm delighted to welcome April Sides.
April is a Drupal developer who works for Lullabot, one of the biggest and most reputable Drupal agencies. She's worked on all sorts of fascinating projects, and at the moment she's helping Georgia.gov (the state of Georgia), move many of their Drupal sites over to Drupal 8.
We talk about what she's been doing in the Drupal world, about DrupalCon Seattle, which happened the previous week. Plus, we discuss what it's like to be part of such a massive government project, helping people out, and making government websites easier to use.
Twitch is a very popular video-streaming service, with around millions of broadcasters and 100s of million of viewers each month.
Twitch is known for live streams of video games, but it has branched out into other topics too. Look around Twitch and you’ll also find music videos and people live-streaming their lives.
With the EmbedPress plugin, you can add Twitch.tv both streams and chats to WordPress, using just an URL.
Wistia is a very cool video marketing service. It has a lot of features designed to make it easy to use videos in your marketing.
With the EmbedPress plugin, you can add Wistia video embeds to WordPress, using just a URL.
Wistia embeds are possible in WordPress, but they’re not easy to use via normal methods. With EmbedPress, you don’t have to mess around with embed code. All you need is the Wistia video URL.
Over the last few weeks, I've been using (and enjoying) Gutenberg more and more.
I've learned to work around its eccentricities and in many way it has made my blogging faster and easier. The Reusable blocks feature has been particularly useful. I'm able to create an image with a caption, or a list of useful links, and quickly drop it into any post.
A new version of Gutenberg is about the make Reusable blocks even better: Gutenberg 5.5 introduces a "Group" block:
An OSTraining member asked us if it was possible to connect Webforms to their content.
I can imagine a lot of use-cases for this. For example, if you have an "Events" content type, you might want a form so visitors can contact the event organizer. Or if you have a "Business" content type, it might be useful for people to contact the business.
This can be done thanks to a module called "Webform Extra Field" and in this tutorial I'll show you how.
In this week's episode, I'm delighted to welcome back Zac Gordon. If you spend any time in the WordPress world, you've probably come across Zac. He's a really enthusiastic and charming teacher who specializes in JavaScript for WordPress. He's done video classes, online conferences, live talks, podcasts, video casts, you name it. He's been out there trying to teach people how to use JavaScript, particularly in the WordPress context.
For the first time, Zac's written a book, and he did it with OSTraining. React Explained is available now, and it teaches you how to use the React framework, which is increasingly popular in WordPress, but also Drupal, Magento, and other platforms. We talk with Zac about his background, his love of yoga, and also about why he decided to focus on React for his first book.
