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:
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:
