The OSTraining Blog - Web Design News and Tutorials

How to Use Google Webfonts in Your Drupal 8 Site

Although Drupal has reputation for being a developers' platform, lots of user rely on Drupal's admin area for key tasks.

For typography in Drupal sites, the best way to change your site's fonts via the admin is a module called @font-your-face

The @font-your-face module allows you to work with webfonts like Google Fonts or Font Squirrel. It also provides the ability to work with paid font services like Typekit or fonts.com.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to configure and use this module in Drupal 8.

How to SEO Optimize Your Multilingual WordPress Site

If you have a multilingual website, it's worth thinking about the SEO challenges you'll face.

Most website owners only need to optimize for one language. Simply adding another language doubles the amount of optimization work you need to do. Plus, you need to think about another version of Google, with different competitors and different challenges.

SEO concerns a real with multilingual websites. In this guide, based on advice from the "How to Build Multilingual WordPress Sites" class, we'll focus on key ways you can improve your site's SEO.

WooCommerce Looks Really Different on WordPress.com

Until the middle of 2017, it wasn't possible to install any plugins on WordPress.com. If you used WordPress.com, you got a very stripped-down WordPress experience. However, that has started to change recently, and users on higher-level WordPress.com plans can now install their own plugins.

Last week, I was helping out a friend with a WordPress.com site and stumbled upon their WooCommerce store. I hadn't been into WordPress.com for some time, and was surprised by how different the experience was. I knew the "Posts" screen was different, but had no idea that WooCommerce also looks very different on WordPress.com.

Allow Your Users to Choose Drupal Entities with the Entity Browser Module

In this blog post, I'm going to show you to enable Drupal users to select entities using the "Entity Browser" module.

This tutorial was requested by an OSTraining customer who is building a book review site. The customer wanted to use Entity Browser so that they can create this feature:

The site has two content types: Books and Book Reviews.
When users create a new Book Review, they can use a view to search for and select the book they're reviewing. For example, if they're reviewing "War and Peace", they can search for the exisiting "War and Peace" node.
When the book review is published, the selected node will be embedded inside the book review.

How to Handle Spam in WordPress without a Captcha

Spam is more than an irritation. It can reduce your productivity. Sometimes the spam prevention can be as bad as the spam itself, making your visitors spot similar images, do maths sums or answer questions to prove that they are human.

This can put people off interacting with your website. Fortunately, WordPress has plugins that can handle spam transparently, without creating irritation to either you or your visitors. In this blog post, you will take a look at two of them.

How to Use the Advanced Gutenberg Blocks Plugin

The new Gutenberg editor is due to arrive with WordPress 5.0 on November 27.

We're already starting to see new types of Gutenberg-specific plugin. These aren't old plugins that have a layer of Gutenberg comptability. These are new plugins that a block-first. They're built for the new Gutenberg era.

One of the most popular of these new plugins is Advanced Gutenberg from JoomUnited. This plugin provides over 20 new blocks. It's helpful to think of them in two categories:

Better versions of the default Gutenberg blocks.
Entirely new blocks not covered by the Gutenberg defaults.

New Book: Local Web Development With DDEV Explained

Say "hello" to the 11th book from OSTraining. This new book introduces a new way to do local web development.

"Local Web Development With DDEV Explained" shows you how to do local development in a way that matches modern development workflows.

Mike Anello is a long-time member of the Drupal and web development communities. In this book, he recommends replacing WAMP, MAMP and similar tools with DDev-Local, a Docker-based system.

DDEV-Local is an open-source local development environment for PHP-based projects. It provides a robust and flexible setup for platforms such as Drupal, WordPress, and TYPO3.

How to Use Elementor with Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress

Elementor and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) are two of the most popular and powerful plugins in WordPress:

Elementor is the leading page builder in WordPress, with over 1 million users.
Advanced Custom Fields turns WordPress into Drupal, with custom fields and content types. It also has over 1 million users!

This week, we have a video showing you how to use these two plugins together to create superb sites. Rod shows you how to create an IMDB-style movie review website using Elementor and ACF together.

How to Create Drupal Charts With Views

There are many ways to present data to your readers. One example would be a table or a list. Sometimes the best approach is to show data on a chart.

It can ease understanding of large quantities of data. There is a way to make charts in Drupal with the help of the Charts module and Views.

In this tutorial, you will learn the basic usage of the module in combination with the Google Charts library.

How to Use the CKEditor Accordion in Drupal 8

As you already learned in a previous tutorial, CKEditor, the default WYSIWYG Editor for Drupal 8, can be enhanced through the installation of different plugins. They add buttons to the editor with additional features.

Content editors often need to embed accordion tabs into their articles, for example, to present a group of Frequently Asked Questions with their answers or to visually divide a topic into several subtopics.

The CKEditor Accordion module for Drupal 8 allows editors to insert an accordion directly into the WYSIWYG Editor (and therefore into the node) without the need to configure additional modules or even Views.

This tutorial will explain the usage of this module. Let’s start!

The OSTraining Podcast #31: Daniel Bachhuber on a Career in WordPress

Daniel has played a key role in Gutenberg, the WP REST API, the WP-CLI project, Co-Authors Plus, Edit Flow, Jetpack, Post Meta Inspector, Publishing Checklist, Rewrite Rules and the list goes on and on.

In this episode, Daniel explains how he accidentally stumbled into such a key role in the WordPress world. We spend time talking about how Daniel balances all these duties, including how he moves on when his time is up in a role.

How to Use Entity Reference Views in Drupal 7

Entity Reference Views are one way you can make life easier for Drupal content creators.

Normally, when people are creating content on your site, each field consists of a single box with a single data point. For example, in a list of people, you might get only the person's name.

Entity Reference Views allows you to provide far more information. For example, you can add photos and personal details to your list of people.

How to Use Entity Reference Views in Drupal 8

Entity Reference Views are a great way to make life easier for Drupal content creators.

Normally, when people create content on your site, each field is very plain. However, Entity Reference Views allows you to provide far more information. For example, instead of just showing a list of users, your content creators can browse through a list of names, photos and personal details.

Both Views and Entity Reference are now part of the Drupal 8 core. This made using Entity Reference Views in Drupal 8 much easier.

If you're a Drupal 7 user, read this version of the tutorial.

The OSTraining Podcast #30: Andy McIlwain on GoDaddy and Gutenberg

Andy McIlwain is in charge of the WordPress area at The GoDaddy Garage - the official blog for one of the world's biggest hosting companies.

Andy explains the tools and strategies he uses to keep such a popular blog running. He also talks how how GoDaddy plans to deal with the rollout of Gutenberg. How do you manage such a big change that impacts so many of your users?

Dropdown Menus in Drupal 8 with the Superfish Module

If you want to build a large, multi-level drop-down menu in Drupal 8, then the Superfish module is a great choice.

The Superfish module makes use of the jQuery Superfish menu plugin, which is useful for multi-level drop-down menus. Superfish has more features than most dropdown menus. It supports touch devices and keyboard interaction.