Over the last couple of years, I've seen one module appear on almost every high profile Drupal site.
That module is Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation, or AdvAgg, for short.
AdvAgg really helps to improve the frontend performance of your site. This module really helps to improve the aggregation and optimization of your site's CSS and Javascript files.
Here are two videos that will help you install and configure AdvAgg:
Bootstrap is winning the web.
Nearly 10% of all websites now use the Bootstrap framework.
That's reflected on Drupal.org, where Bootstrap is the third most popular theme. Bootstrap is a base theme that integrates Bootstrap 3 with Drupal.
Here's a guide to getting started with the Bootstrap theme.
In my opinion, there are two modules that illustrate the power of Drupal better than any others.
The first module is Views, which most people become familiar with as soon as they learn Drupal. The other is Rules.
Rules is the basis for almost any workflow that's set up in Drupal. You probably need Rules, whether you're running an intranet, a social network, an e-commerce site, or any site that needs "First this, then that" commands.
In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to use Rules to automatically update a node. We're going to make a record of the last person to see this node:
Back in 2012, there was a wave of mergers and acquisitions amongst Drupal agencies.
The most high-profile merger involved four different companies forming Wunderkraut, which now has around 170 team members.
There was also the Phase2 and Treehouse partnership, plus the merger of DrupalConnect and NorthStudio in Canada. And, although they were smaller deals, Acquia picked up Cyrve, Growing Venture Solutions, Drupal Scout and Mollom.
In 2012, acquisitions were so common that they became a community joke.
Fast forward to 2015, and we're seeing a second, much larger round of mergers and acquisitions:
Last week, two different OSTraining members asked me about using the Juicebox image gallery with Drupal.
To be honest, I had never heard of Juicebox, but the members said that it looked great and worked well. After testing Juicebox, I agree. It's a good option for people who want a basic image gallery in Drupal.
When you first load up a new Drupal site, the front page of your site shows this message:
"No front page content has been created yet".
You can click "Add new content" and start writing. If you do that, your content will start to stack up, just like a stream of blog posts.
But what happens if you don't want a stream of blog posts for your frontpage? Here are several solutions.
UPDATE: Firebug is not supported anymore. Please try Dev Tools in Firefox, or Developer Tools in Chrome instead.
There are several tools that that makes designing for Drupal much, much easier.
In particular, we recommend the Theme developer module and also Firebug.
Many of you may know about Firebug already. It's a browser tool that allows you to inspect any CSS, HTML or JavaScript elements.
Think of Theme developer as a Drupal-specific version of Firebug. Using Theme developer you can click on any element of your Drupal site and get a breakdown of how it was built.
One of the most frequent questions we get asked by OSTraining members is this:
"Is there an easy shopping cart for Drupal?"
Don't get me wrong. Drupal Commerce is a great system, and we have a detailed video class explaining how to use it. But no-one would describe Drupal Commerce as easy, and Ubercart is equally difficult.
There are few other valid e-commerce options. One, called Basic Cart, works great but doesn't actually have any payment options.
So in this tutorial, we'll explain how to use Shopify.com and Drupal together. Shopify is a robust option and can reduce the burden of maintaining an e-commerce store.
When you first install the Views module, it comes with several example views.
One of the most popular examples is the Glossary view, which takes a large amount of content and organizes it all by the first letter of the content title. This is useful in a lot of situations, especially when you're creating a directory of businesses or people.
Here's what the Glossary view looks like:
Several times, our members have asked about finding the Node ID of individual pieces of Drupal content. The Node ID is the primary key in the database for Drupal content and it's useful in many situations.
If you don't have the Pathauto module installed, this information is easy to find. By default, the Node ID is directly in the URL of the content.
However, if you have the Pathauto module enabled (as most sites do) the Node ID can be hard to find. Here's the solution ...
Everyone is excited for the launch of Drupal 8.
Come and join us and Acquia on August 20th for a fast-paced Drupal 8 webinar.
Rod will introduce you to all the major advances in Drupal 8. Rod will cover user-friendly features, including the mobile-friendly admin interface and the in-place WYSIWYG editor, plus improvements in theming and module development.
If you have a large Drupal site, you may have a large number of roles and users.
Yes, you can create fake accounts for each user role, but that becomes very cumbersome if you have more than a couple of roles.
Yes, you can ask the user for their password, or reset if for them, but that's a painful process.
The solution is the Masquerade module which allows you to easily browse the site through the eyes of any user you choose:
When developers install Drupal modules, they rely on Drush or version control to manage their work.
However, most ordinary Drupal users do everything through the admin interface. They install modules via the "Install new modules" link.
Sometimes that link goes missing. If you can't find your "Install new modules" link, here are four possible solutions.
In particular, people want to pull information and display it through Views.
The Views Database Connector module makes this relatively easy. Let's show you how it's done.
There are a variety of ways in which you can control access to your content. We've covered the Content Access and Taxonomy Access modules before.
However, using the Rules module has several advantages for membership sites:
Yes, you read that right: we're going to release 200 free Drupal 8 videos.
We want Drupal 8 to be a success. One way we can help make that happen is to make reliable training available to as wide an audience as possible.
Back in April, we launched our Drupal 8 training Kickstarter project. The project closed in mid-May with enough sponsorship for 100 videos, but over the last 6 weeks we've been talking with more sponsors and now have backing for 200 videos!
Here's an overview of the all the free Drupal training, plus an introduction to the organizations who made it possible.
By default, Drupal 7 creates URLs that look like this, "/?q=node/4".
This type of URL can be hard to read, hard to remember and may not be search engine friendly. The solution is to configure Drupal's clean URLs.
Drupal provides a test so you can see whether your site is ready for clean URLs:
An OSTraining member recently took our recommendation and installed the Administration Menu module, which makes it much easier to navigate through your Drupal site.
However, after enabling Administration Menu, they found that they lost their Shortcuts menu. This is normally the grey bar under Drupal's default admin toolbar.
Here's how to use Administration Menu and Shortcuts together.
There was a Drupal security release this week.
This release managed to confuse several of our users, because it wasn't clear if they should update their sites.
Security release information is rarely, if ever, written in plain English. And these week's updates were additionally confusing because they only impacted some Drupal sites.
So here, upon request, is our plain English guide to Drupal security releases.
It's good practice to allow users to leave your site completely.
That means users should be able to delete their account entirely, together with all the data associated with it.
In Drupal, you can allow users to delete their accounts. Here's how the feature works:
Have you ever updated your Drupal site only to suddenly have errors?
If you use Drupal regularly, this will happen to you at some point. One common way to solve an error is with a patch. A patch changes the code on your site, but only by editing a file rather than providing a complete update.
However, applying a patch isn't easy for non-coders. Many of the available instructions for applying patches ask you to use an application called Drush and to use command line instructions. These instructions can be intimidating, so we're going to show you how non-coders can safely apply patches using the Patch Manager module.
One of our customers was setting up a Drupal Commerce site and wanted to add a slider search.
Here's an example of a slider search in action:
There are a lot of steps involved in this process, but it's worth the effort. This tutorial will use the default search, without relying on Apache Solr or alternatives.
Drupal 8 will ship with a new version of the Drupal logo, known as the Druplicon.
It's not the biggest news in the world, but this will make some people happy. The discussion about replacing the logo lists several design problems with the current version:
DrupalCon Los Angeles took place from May 11 to 15 and three of our team were there.
Three of our team joined over 3100 people who crowded into downtown L.A.
We'll recap our favorite sessions in another blog post, but here are some thoughts on DrupalCon L.A. and where DrupalCons are headed.
Drupal 8 is just around the corner, and the Drupal community is excited!
We want to make sure that as many people as possible can use Drupal 8. However, many new Drupal 8 users will need training, which can be expensive and difficult to find.
So, we started a Kickstarter project to create Drupal 8 training and give it away for free!
Sounds intriguing? Watch the video to find out more ...
Views Calc is useful little Drupal module that allows you to perform calculations inside Views.
Views Calc allows you to perform Count, Sum, Average or Minimum calculations on a single field.
Let's see an example of how Views Calc works. To follow the example, you need both the Views and Views Calc modules to be enabled.
Over the last few years we've been writing a regular series called the "State of Drupal 8".
We aim to give a short, plain English update for people who don't follow Drupal development closely.
So, here's the busy person's guide to the state of Drupal 8 in March 2015 ...
Are you looking for a job? Have you considered working in the Drupal world?
Several OSTraining members have. They wondered about the skills they would need and the income level they could expect.
To give you an overview of what it takes to make a living in the Drupal world, we spoke with Mike Anello. Mike is a long-time Drupal contributor, based near us in Orlando, Florida. If you've ever seen a Dries keynote address at a Drupal, Mike is often the person asking Dries questions at the end.
One of my key takeaways from talking with Mike - the Drupal jobs are out there, but companies are now expecting applicants to bring more than just Drupal knowledge.
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.
