We've taught a LOT of people to use Drupal 7 over the last 4 years and one bug comes up more than any other.
When enabling large new modules such as CTools via the admin interface, it's not uncommon for other modules to become unpublished.
When those modules are unpublished, people often lose access for to the administration menu. Needless to say, that's not a helpful situation for beginners.
So, here's a quick guide to recovering from a lost Drupal administration menu.
One of our members was watching our video class on Drupal's Workbench module and had been getting it set up on their site. However, they weren't sure how to use the new moderation states they added.
They wanted to add a tab so that people could easily see the content in a particular moderation state.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to make that happen.
Several times in the last few weeks, OSTraining students have asked us about maps in Drupal.
The students wanted to set up directories that would show Google maps for each location.
They also wanted to create larger maps that would display multiple locations at once.
We recommended that the students use the GMap module. However, although that module is powerful, it is poorly documented and can be confusing to use.
So, here's a beginners guide to the GMap module.
One of our members had this question for us:
"I'm using the Date module and I would like it to display morning as AM and evening as PM. At the moment it shows 15:00, but I'd like it to show 3 PM".
In this tutorial, we'll answer that question and show you how to set up Date and Time formats in Drupal.
By default, Drupal file fields have very limited permission options.
So, if you want to make some files available only to certain user groups, you'll need an extra module.
For some simple examples, we recommend the Private files download permission module.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use that module to allow only logged-in users to download a file.
Normally, Drupal views are set up to run automatically. In these situations, every time new content is added, Views will instantly update its displays for you.
However, sometimes, such as with a slideshow, you may want to manually control which content is shown.
One option to do this is the Nodequeue module. But, in this video, Robert Ring is going to show you how to manually select content without using any extra modules.
One of our members asked an interesting question about Views.
They had a file field on their user profiles. In that field, the user could upload an image, an audio file, or link to a YouTube video. So far, so good. However, in Views, they only wanted to show that field if it contained a video.
Here's the solution to that problem. We're going to show you how to filter Drupal content based on the type of file that's attached to it.
Views is a very powerful tool that allows you to pull information from your database in many flexible ways.
However, there will be situations where the default options in Views aren't enough. The Views PHP module allows you even more flexibility.
In these two videos, Robert Ring, one of our Drupal teachers, shows you how to re-write a View using PHP.
Alphabetical sorting is one of the most common ways people want to sort content in Views.
You may want to sort many types of content from A to Z, from staff members to business listings.
Here's how to add alphabetical sorting to your Drupal views.
Services is really popular and works with formats such as REST, XMLRPC, JSON and SOAP.
However, when asked about Services during a training class last week, I was realized that the students were asking me because there was little-to-no clear documentation available.
So, I sat down and decided to write a Beginners guide to the Services module.
Here's a 5-step guide to using Services creating a REST API for your Drupal site.
I wasn't sure whether to publish this review or not.
One of our members wanted a really simple shopping cart for Drupal. They found the Basic Cart module and asked me about it.
So, I set up and tested Basic Cart. Everything worked great, until the end when I realized there was no payment gateway. None. Basic Cart is a great little e-commerce store ... except it has no way to pay.
The Quiz module is a sophisticated and flexible way to create quizzes in Drupal.
Quiz has many nice features such as Views integration, a jQuery-based timer, drag-and-drop ordering of questions and the ability to give weighted grades for answers.
Quiz allows you to create questions with multiple formats and has an API that allows you to add more.
By now you've probably heard about the extremely serious Drupal security issue from mid-October.
The Drupal security team issued a new warning two weeks later that, if possible, escalated the severity of the issue.
Here's an overview of the issue and its impact.
If you weren't able to update your Drupal site within a few hours on October 15th, you may be worried about your site.
Even under normal conditions, it's almost never possible to prove that a site is 100% safe.
But by checking your site, you can either give yourself some additional peace of mind, or you can confirm that you were hacked.
We have several different Drupal photo gallery tutorials on this blog. The most popular is Views Photo Galleries for Drupal 7, followed closely by an older tutorial, Node Gallery for Drupal 6.
However, although Views is powerful, it is too complex for many users. For this reason, Node Gallery remains very popular.
So we've realized that it's time for an updated tutorial that covers Node Gallery in Drupal 7.
Node Gallery is still the easiest way to build a photo gallery in Drupal. It requires very little set-up and almost no configuration.
We're accustomed to the Drupal security team releasing security fixes.
Fortunately, most of the fixes were relatively minor. They either impacted a small group of sites, or they were unlikely to lead to your site being hacked.
Let's take a brief look at the 4 previous Drupal security advisories in 2014:
Here at OSTraining we've given significant coverage to Drupal Commerce. You can watch a video class with nearly 30 lessons and download a book, "Building E-commerce Sites with Drupal Commerce".
However, Drupal Commerce is an enterprise-quality solution and a good number of OSTraining members have asked for simpler solutions.
For those members, we often recommend the Payment module, which makes it easy to add e-commerce fields to your content.
Payment supports about half-a-dozen gateways (PayPal, Stripe, iDEAL, Authorize.net, Ogone, Rabo OmniKassa).
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use the Payment module, together with PayPal.
Over the last few months, Dave Reid, one of the most active Drupal developers, has been giving a presentation called "Future-proof your Drupal 7 site".
Dave talks about decisions you can make now on existing or new Drupal 7 sites to make transitioning to Drupal 8 easier. He comes up with a list of modules that have been backported to Drupal 8. Using those modules means you won't have to re-train your staff for Drupal 8.
Dave also has some recommendation for modules not to use, because they've been replaced by alternative solutions in Drupal 8. Here are 6 modules that may be worth avoiding if want an easier update to Drupal 8 in years to come ...
DrupalCon Amsterdam takes place this week.
Nearly 2000 people are going to be at the venue itself, but even more will join remotely.
If you're sitting at your desk next week and can't be in the Netherlands, there's still plenty of opportunity to join DrupalCon Amsterdam.
Here are three ways you can take part ...
Last year, we wrote about 4 social sharing modules for Drupal: Service Links, Social Share, AddThis, AddToAny.
ShareThis is another useful option for adding Facebook, Twitter and other social buttons to your site.
The ShareThis module is really easy to set up. Here's how the ShareThis module works:
One OSTraining member told us that they had a database error on their site.
Here's the error that was showing:
PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'cache_rules' doesn't exist
Fortunately, a solution was provided on the Drupal forums. However, the solution was an update to the database, and our member wanted some advice on how to run that update.
Last year we wrote a blog post called, "5 Ways to Tell if a Site is Built in Drupal"
That helped answer one of the most popular questions we get during Drupal beginner classes.
However, the follow-up questions inevitably came, including questions like these:
Static websites, with no database, used to be enormously popular in the 1990's. They are slowly becoming more popular again in the 2010's.
Some developers are also modifying platforms like Drupal so that they no longer require a database.
If you've been to Drupal events recently, there's a very good chance that you've heard the phrase, "Headless Drupal".
The phrase brings up thoughts of dead horsemen and horror movies.
But, is Headless Drupal scary? And what in fact is Headless Drupal?
We're going to answer that question in this blog post. Let's try and understand what Headless Drupal is and who's using it.
Drupal Commerce is popular amongst our members, because it's the most reliable way to build an e-commerce site with Drupal.
Drupal Commerce empowers you to build any type of eCommerce website, making as few hard-coded assumptions as possible about your business needs.
One of our members wanted to create a taxonomy of Countries, Provinces and Districts.
For example, you might choose England, then Yorkshire, then Leeds. Or you might choose Canada, then Ontario, then Toronto. You get the idea.
In this tutorial, we'll use the Hierarchical Select module to make that happen.
There are some sophisticated and flexible ways to add video to Drupal.
But, by far the simplest option is the Video Embed Field.
If all you want to do is easily add Youtube or Vimeo videos to articles, then this module is probably your best option.
Here's how Video Embed Field works:
We recently published a tutorial explaining how to build a business directory with Drupal.
Questions about directories have been a popular topic lately and some of our members have had more advanced questions.
For example, one member wanted to show all of the restaurants in a certain city.
In this tutorial, we're going to use a module called Views Field View to show you one approach to getting that done.
CKEditor is a powerful editing tool that makes content creation in Drupal far more flexible and enjoyable.
However, CKEditor has some drawbacks. For example, CKEditor wasn't originally designed to work with Drupal and doesn't have a way to easily link to other Drupal content.
Linkit is the solution to CKEditor's limited linking options. If you install Linkit on top of CKEditor, it will be a breeze to create accurate internal links.
Here are 3 videos showing you how to use Linkit. The videos do assume that you already have CKEditor installed.
Until now, when people asked us how to handle media in Drupal, we recommended a couple of solutions:
However, lately we've started to experiment with Scald which promises to be a really interesting and powerful option.
Here's our quick-start guide to help you start exploring the power of Scald.
