It's important to check links on your site to make sure they're working. Sometimes when URLs get updated, some links are forgotten. Manually checking a site for all links can be labor intensive and time consuming.
That's where Drupal's Link Checker module comes in. It's an excellent module that saves you a lot of time. This tutorial will help you to get started with it.
There are multiple different ways to design a Drupal site. You can code your theme, or you can use modules such as Panels, Context and Display Suite.
I'm reluctant to answer the question of which solution is "best", but we do often get asked about which approach Drupal site-builders should use.
In this video, Robert Ring compares Context and Panels, explaining different situations in which he'd choose to use each module. If you want to learn more, we have full classes on Context and Panels.
Last week the Drupal 8 community hit an important milestone with the first Release Candidate for Drupal 8.
What does "Release Candidate" mean? It means that this version is ready to be considered as the official release for Drupal 8. If no more critical bugs are found, then this will indeed become Drupal 8.0.
This is an important milestone for OSTraining too. This week we're getting started on the 200 videos we'll release for free.
When you login to a Drupal site, the very first link you will see in the admin bar is "Dashboard".
Even though it's the first link, few people seem to use it, perhaps because they don't fully understand what it does. Perhaps as a result, the Dashboard won't be included in Drupal 8.
In this video, taken from our Better Drupal Administration class, Robert explains what the Dashboard does. It really can be a helpful control panel for users of small sites.
At the end of 2014, one of OSTraining team member chose Docker as their favorite innovation of the year.
Why is Docker so great? Often developers discover code that’s working on a local machine may not work as expected in other environments.
Also a lot of time is often wasted trying to configure all the developers environments to work perfectly for the application you need to run.
We previously wrote a tutorial on how to create custom 403 and 404 pages in Drupal.
That tutorial used Drupal's built-in functionality, but that approach does have a few disadvantages.
So today we'll look at another approach, the CustomError module.
Too often we assume that some things are plainly obvious. However, for a brand new user to Drupal, knowing the best practices for Drupal site creation is a must.
This video tutorial will cover the basics of installing a new module in Drupal 7.
One of our users didn't like the generic "Access denied" message for restricted pages. So we created this tutorial for him.
This tutorial will show you how to create custom error pages for 403 (Access Denied) and also 404 (Not Found) errors.
Do you want many of the benefits of the new Drupal 8 admin area, without actually needing to upgrade? Check out the Adminimal theme.
Adminimal provides a responsive admin area for Drupal 7 sites.
Adminimal also has several usability improvements. For example, Adminimal has colored buttons for common tasks like Submit, Preview and Delete to them easier to see. Adminimal also provides improved layouts for the Configuration, and Module screens.
In this video, taken from our Better Drupal Administration class, Robert Ring introduces you to Adminimal:
Drupal 8 is a massive undertaking. It's already been 5 years in the making.
Why did it take so long? Partly because so many important contributed modules are now core features. Translation is a perfect example.
It used to take several contributed modules to make even a small multi-lingual Drupal 7 site. Now, you can translate everything using just the Drupal 8 core.
Here's our 5-step guide to building your first Drupal 8 multi-lingual site.
Whenever a user clicks on a taxonony term, they will see a page showing all content tagged with that term.
By default, Drupal shows the most recent layout first, using a teaser display.
But, what can you do if you want to sort content in another way, or use a different display? The answer is to use Views to control your taxonomy pages.
In this video from our "Advanced Views" class, Robert shows you how this is done:
One of our members had a problem. They wanted to display a large number of images inside a Panel.
The images were all uploaded to a node and they were displaying vertically.
Our recommendation was to use Views. This allows you to take much greater control over how the images are displayed.
By default, the Drupal 7 core loads around 20 different CSS and Javascript files.
So, in order to make your Drupal site run quickly, it's essential to load those files as quickly as possible. It's easy to get started by enabling the aggregation and compression options in Drupal.
Aggregation gathers all the files together and loads them as one. Compression reduces the size of each individual file, stripping out unnecessary characters, whitespace and implementing CSS shortcuts.
In this video, Robert Ring shows you how to enable Drupal's core aggregation and compression options:
The Drupal 8 core has far more features than the Drupal 7 core. Many popular contributed modules have been included in the core, including five field types.
Here are the 5 new fields in Drupal 8:
This week one of our members came up with an interesting question about the Webform module. They wanted to redirect users to different pages depending on their answers.
Here's how you can make that work using Webform conditionals.
Creating a REST API export in Drupal 7 is not always an easy process.
In a previous tutorial, we explained how to use the Services module, but that can be a complex and sometimes buggy option.
In comparison, Drupal 8 is a breath of fresh air. You can create web services using on the Drupal 8 core.
Views Bulk Operations (VBO) is one of those modules whose name and Drupal.org description doesn't indicate how useful it is.
Here's the short version of what VBO does it:
Drupal has strong default caching systems, but the Boost module offers significant improvements.
Boost creates a cache in the file system rather than the database, so Drupal never needs to communicate with the database. This provides major a performance and scalability boost for sites that receiving mostly anonymous traffic (it doesn't help so much with logged-in users).
Boost will cache and compress your site's HTML, XML, Ajax, CSS and Javascript. There's also a built-in module that will regenerate pages once they are marked as expired.
Boost isn't always this easiest module to set-up, but this video will help you get started.
Flexslider is a jQuery plugin by WooThemes and it makes it very easy to create slideshows.
You can integrate it into Drupal easily, using the FlexSlider module which has full Views integration.
The FlexSlider page on WooThemes.com, shown below, gives you an idea of the slideshows you can build with FlexSlider.
Over the last few weeks, we've been working really hard on preparing training for Drupal 8.
We'll release the training close to the actual launch date of Drupal 8, but before then we have a great video to get you started.
This is a webinar we did with Acquia called, "10 Things Site Builders Need to Know Before Leaping to Drupal 8".
I talked about the many user-friendly features in Drupal 8, including the mobile-friendly admin interface and the in-place WYSIWYG editor, plus improvements in theming and module development:
If you've forgotten your Drupal password and try unsuccessfully to login, you may get this message:
"Sorry, there have been more than 5 failed login attempts for this account. It is temporarily blocked."
The image below shows how the message appears. I'm going to show you how you can fix this error.
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:
