The OSToolbar is our way of making life easier for webdesigners. Using the OSToolbar, you can place video tutorials directly into a WordPress dashboard.
Your clients can watch the videos and learn how to use WordPress without needing to call you all of the time.
The OSToolbar is available to all members of OSTraining. If you'd like to use it, you can click here to become a member.
A new release of the OSToolbar is coming in the next few days. Here are the four new features in this release.
The beta version of WordPress 3.4 is out.
So what's new? At first glance, you might say "not much". Unlike version 3.3, there are no easily visible changes to the admin area.
WordPress 3.4 is all about making theme customization easier, but even when you click on Appearance, you still won't notice any changes.
It's only when you dig deeper that you start to notice the magic.
Node Access Password is a module that allows you to password-protect your Drupal content.
This module will automatically generate a random password for each node you want to protect. That password must be entered before viewing the content.
Organic Groups (OG) is the social networking solution for Drupal. It forms the basis of http://groups.drupal.org and also powers Drupal Commons, the widely used social networking distribution.
OG allows users to create and manage their own groups. Other members can then join those groups and share content either privately or publicly.
Two notes of caution before we start:
Here's an introduction to OG for Drupal 6. Click here for our tutorial on Organic Groups for Drupal 7.
The Drupal core provides a Search module that is great for many sites. However, it doesn't provide some of the more sophisticated features that some sites need. The Custom Search module is a good alternative if you want more control over what gets searched, who gets to search, and what results you see.
WordPress has nearly 20,000 plugins, which is both a blessing and a curse for beginners.
On the one hand, it's wonderful that so many developers have produced so much free software. On the other hand, it can be really hard to find the good plugins when there are so many to sort through.
We often get asked for our favorite plugins and so here's a list of some of the favorites used by the staff at OSTraining.
Multi-sites is a Drupal feature that makes managing many websites easier.
The idea with multi-sites is that you can use a single codebase for more than one website. When you update that single codebase, you update all of your Drupal sites. Each site can still have its own theme, modules and content.
This is a live blog of "What You See Is (Not Always) What You Get (but it can be)" by Andrew Mallis.
One of the most asked questions we get in our Drupal training from those coming from WordPress or Joomla is "Where is the WYSIWYG editor?". This is one of Drupal's shortcomings for content editors and beginning site builders. It's high on the planned list of things to fix in Drupal 8.
Until that arrives, in another 18 months time, Andrew demonstrated a solid option for creating WYSIWYG capabilities in Drupal.
http://bit.ly/ideograph-wysiwyg is the key document to use if you want to try his recommended solution.
Luke Wroblewski gave a keynote address at DrupalCon Denver called Mobile First. He talked about the upcoming mobile revolution and how it will affect all of our interactions with the web.
This was the best keynote I can remember seeing at a tech conference. Whether you use Drupal, Joomla WordPress, this presentation is well worth watching if you couldn't make it in person.
This is a live blog of "Drupal Commerce: eCommerce any way you need it" by Ryan Szrama at DrupalCon Denver.
You can read our full tutorial on Drupal Commerce here.
The Wednesday keynote at DrupalCon Denver was by Mitchell Baker who is the Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The title of her talk was "Collaboration, the "Maker Ethic" and Internet Freedom".
This is a live blog of "Beginner Drupal Theming" at DrupalCon Denver by David Needham.
This is a live blog of the Drupal Media session at DrupalCon Denver by Aaron Winborn and Dave Reid. The sessions is all about the Media module. We wrote a detailed introduction to the Media module here.
Aaron wrote the Drupal Multimedia book. He introduces himself as an ALS sufferer who will likely die within a year unless he's one of the lucky 10%. If he is one of the lucky 10%, he'll live in a locked-in sate. He'ss increasingly physically weak and can't hear very well. He wrote about the condition here.
This week Drupal fans gathered in Colorado for DrupalCon Denver.
Dries Buytaert gave the keynote address. He talked about the mobile web and the plans for Drupal 8.
There were just over 3000 people at DrupalCon this year and most of them were in the huge auditorium at the Colorado Convention Center.
The Drupal project page for Context describes it in this way: "Context allows you to manage contextual conditions and reactions for different portions of your site. You can think of each context as representing a "section" of your site. For each context, you can choose the conditions that trigger this context to be active and choose different aspects of Drupal that should react to this active context."
Here's what that means to you: "you can make blocks, themes and more show only where you want them."
You should always update to the latest version of Drupal to take advantage of updates and to also guard your site's security. It's not a difficult process, but there are quite a few steps if you want to avoid errors and get it right the first time. This tutorial shows you every step involved.
Here's how to update your Drupal 6 core files:
