The OSTraining Blog - Web Design News and Tutorials

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s2Member Paid Membership Plugin for WordPress

s2member-pro WordPress is great for multi-users and for creating blog sites. But what if you want to monetize it so you can charge for subscriptions? There are some plugins available, this one we found to be not only free, but fully featured.

Of all the ones tested, this was the most complete out-of-the-box, and had the most documentation, with over 50 help videos. The documentation is excellent, but I found the first few steps to be time consuming with trial and error. Here is a quick-start guide to s2Member:

Online Drupal Training Targeted Directly at Beginners

Drupal is one part of a three-headed Open Source CMS revolution.

Added together, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress run around 20% of all websites and over 70% of all CMS websites (via W3 techs).

We're really happy to announce today that we teach all of them online. Joomla and WordPress were available last year and now Drupal is here.

So, by buying a single subscription to OSTraining, you can now learn how to use all three of these revolutionary ways to build a site.

Quick Language Translation for WP using Google Ajax Translate

Add Google AJAX Translation to your blog. This plugin allows your readers to translate your blog posts, pages, or comments into 52 languages.

The Google AJAX Translation WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple, and light way to add translation to your blog.

A "Translate" button can be added to the bottom or top of posts, pages, and/or comments. When the button is clicked a popup window opens showing a list of available languages.

Upgrade at the OS Corral - Win $200 and Free Joomla Books

Shootout at the OS Corral

How to Install File Manager elFinder in Wordpress

elfinder One of our students was having difficulty getting access to his CSS files, so we created this tutorial for him.

This tutorial will show you how you can access and manage your server's files (php, css, etc) directly from your Wordpress admin area using a file manager called elFinder.

Installing Acquia Dev Desktop on a PC

This tutorial will show you how to install a copy of Drupal on your computer. We'll be using the "Acquia Dev Desktop" from http://acquia.com. It is perhaps the quickest, easiest and most reliable way to run Drupal locally. (For MAC Version Go Here.)

Installing Acquia Dev Desktop on a MAC

This tutorial will show you how to install a copy of Drupal on your computer. We'll be using the "Acquia Dev Desktop" from http://acquia.com. It is perhaps the quickest, easiest and most reliable way to run Drupal locally. (For P.C. version go here.)

Changes to Our Joomla Classroom Training

We're making some changes to our Joomla Classroom training and have three pieces of news for you, one good, one bad and one so-so.

Four Times More Training and Support

Are you ready for a pleasant surprise?

You're not? It's too late in the week?

Tough luck. We're going to give you a pleasant surprise anyway. In fact, we're going to give you two.

Finding Block Regions in Drupal 6 and 7

Regions are important in Drupal because they control where you can place blocks and thus create a layout for your site. However, each theme has different regions and it is not always easy to know where your theme's regions are.

Here's a quick tutorial showing you how to find the block regions on your Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site.

How To Manually Install WordPress On Your Webhost

This has become fairly simple since most hosting companies supply a version of an automatic installer that puts WordPress where you want it with a couple button clicks. But there are still occasions when you want to install it manually. Here's the quick install method, that is relatively simple.

What's New in WordPress 3.2?

WordPress 3.2 in with the new - out with the old. The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter.Moving forward has enabled some impressive improvements. The streamlining enabled retiring support for PHP4, and older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6, which allows WordPress to take advantage of more features enabled by new technologies.

Safely Upgrading WP 3.1 to 3.2

WordPress 3.2 has some significant upgrades.

Refreshed admin area
New default theme "Twenty Eleven"
Full Screen Editor - Distraction free writing experience
Extended Admin Bar - More useful links to control the site

How to Put Drupal 7 in Maintenance Mode

When you're updating your Drupal site, you'll need to put it into Maintenance Mode so that no problems occur for you or visitors.

Here's how to turn on Maintenance Mode in Drupal 7:

Updating Drupal 7 to the Latest Version

Updating a Drupal site is vital for security.

In this tutorial we're going to show you how to update your Drupal 7 site from one minor version to another. That means from 7.0 to 7.2 or 7.2 to 7.4. and so on.

Unfortunately moving between major versions such as from 5 to 6 or from 6 to 7 is a much bigger topic and too large for a single tutorial.

Before you start, please remember one thing: backup, backup, backup, backup, backup, backup, backup, backup your site!

Using Linkit with TinyMCE and Drupal

Linkit provides an easy interface for internal linking. Linkit links to nodes, users, views and terms by default, using an autocomplete field.
Linkit requires that Pathologic is also installed.

Pathologic is an input filter which can correct paths in links and images in your Drupal content in situations which would otherwise cause them to “break;” for example, if the URL of the site changes, or the content was moved to a different server.

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