Tables are often the best way to display complicated information but they can be difficult to make attractive.

Tables can be used to display information that needs to be compared in order for it to make sense. But sometimes they can be difficult to read and even harder to put into documents. Updating them can also be difficult if information needs to be reorganized or updated.

TablePress is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress. It lets you create and manage beautiful tables without having to code anything. You can embed tables into posts, pages, or text widgets using a shortcode.

Read more ...

Since 2018, European site-builders have a legal obligation to meet a specific requirement. Their sites must display a banner to inform people about the use of cookies.

This European requirement is mandatory in order to comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

In other words, you must ask user permission if you want to store cookies on the browser of a European (EU) citizen.

The EU Cookie Compliance D8 module provides an easy way to manage this type of functionality. In this tutorial, you will learn about the installation and basic configuration of this module.

Let’s start!

Read more ...

In the third tutorial of this series, you learned that the align-items flexbox property specifies how flex-items are distributed along the cross axis of the flex-container. The align-content property specifies how the lines inside the container will be distributed, once you have applied the flex-wrap property.

The align-content property accepts 6 possible values:

• stretch (default)
• center
• flex-start
• flex-end
• space-between
• space-around

Let’s demonstrate this with an example!

Read more ...

Until now, you have seen that flex-items stay on the same line, regardless of the content inside them and the space available.

With the flex-wrap property, it is possible to make flex-items wrap over to the next line.

Let’s demonstrate this property with an example.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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:

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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:

• Freshman
• Sophomore.

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!

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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!

Read more ...

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 I strongly advise against using the iframe.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...