A few times over the last couple of weeks, OSTraining members have run into trouble with CKEditor for Drupal.
They find that some buttons are missing from CKEditor when they try to create content.
These buttons include the Styles, Format and Size icons.
A Beginners Guide to Drupal Sub-themes
If you are using a Drupal theme from Drupal.org, the best way to make changes to the code is by using a sub-theme.
Using a sub-theme means you can safely update the underlying theme without losing any of your changes.
These two videos are a beginners guide to creating and using a sub-theme.
These videos are part of our complete class on Drupal theming.
10 Ways to Block Spam Registrations in Drupal
If you're going to use popular software like Drupal, one of the downsides is that you'll need to deal with spam.
A lot of OSTraining members report that they receive many spam user registrations on their sites.
In this blog post, we'll look at 10 of the best ways to avoid getting overwhelmed by spam users.
Drupal Webinar: 45 Modules in 45 Minutes
Last week, I did a webinar with the team at Acquia. The webinar was called, "45 Modules in 45 Minutes".
During this session, we walked … jogged … okay, actually we ran through 45 of the best and most popular modules in 45 minutes.
Drupal is a great CMS, but not all features come right out of the box. There are thousands and thousand of modules available for Drupal 7. Figuring out which modules to use can be a real challenge!
In this webinar, you'll get an overview of 45 of the most important modules.
Remove Duplicate Views Results
When you are building a Drupal site and creating views, it's not uncommon to find that your view is showing the same result multiple times.
Here are two common ways to remove duplicate views results.
Entity Views Attach: Use Views Almost Anywhere
Entity Views Attach (EVA) is a wonderfully useful Drupal module which makes Views more powerful.
EVA allows you to automatically attach any view to content, comments or terms.
We're going to show you 2 examples of EVA in use. Both of them solve problems that were asked by our members this week.
First, we'll see how to sort terms however we want and then we'll see how to add an image for a file download link.
Decimal, Float or Integer in Drupal Fields?
Drupal comes with 13 fields and several of them deal with numbers.
Newcomers to Drupal can become confused about the difference because there are 5 different number fields available:
- Decimal
- Float
- Integer
- List (float)
- List (integer)
In this tutorial, we're going to explain the difference between those 5 number fields and explain when you would use each one.
Sending HTML Emails from Drupal Webform
The Webform module is one of the most popular modules in Drupal.
Webform is relied upon for everything, from contact forms, to donations to event registrations.
By default, Webform sends emails in plain text. In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to send Webform emails in plain text, which allows you choose different layouts or designs.
4 Social Sharing Modules for Drupal
If you don't give your site visitors an opportunity to share your webpages, you're missing out on an opportunity for others to hear about your great content.
Drupal has several modules that allow you to add Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social buttons.
In this blog, we're going to introduce you to four different options for adding social sharing to your Drupal site:
Display Suite and Views Together in Drupal
Display Suite is one of our very favorite Drupal modules.
We love how easy it is for even new Drupal users to control their content layouts with Display Suite.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how you can use Display Suite together with Views. This allows you to create complex pages, controlling both the output and layout, without knowing any code.
Show Drupal Users Their Own Content
If you have multiple content creators on your site, you may want to make their life easier.
One way that you can help is by providing a list of the content they have created.
There are advanced ways to do this, such as using the Workbench module, but in this tutorial we'll show you an easy way to provide a list of each user's content.
The State of Drupal 8: November 2013
Over the last two years, we've been running a series called The State of Drupal 8.
With each post in the series, we aim to keep you up-to-date with the important new features and changes.
So, what's new in Drupal? Quite a lot.
Since our last update, the Drupal team have re-designed the installation process, finished the multi-lingual improvements, improved the UI, removed two key modules and proposed a new release cycle.
Drupal 7.24 and 6.29: tmp directory and .htaccess
Drupal 7.24 and 6.29 were released in mid-November.
Both versions contained security fixes.
One of the fixes is described as "Code execution prevention". The Drupal security team wanted to add an extra layer of protection to stop hackers from uploading malicious files.
This fix requires some people to make a manual change to their site and this tutorial will show you how.
Drupal Menu Permissions Explained
With some CMSs such as Joomla, menus are very powerful features. They can control layouts, permissions, metadata and much more.
In Drupal, menus have almost no power at all. By default, menus are not capable of controlling much more than the destination of their link. So, we end up with a lot of questions from students about menus.
This week a student asked us how they control who can see menu links. This tutorial is our answer.
We're going to show how Drupal menu permissions work and how you can make them more powerful.
5 Videos to Get Anyone Started with Drupal Themes
If you haven't worked with Drupal themes before, then you're in the right place.
These 5 videos average less than 5 minutes each and cover everything you need to get started with Drupal theming:
- A general introduction to Drupal themes
- How the Drupal theming system works
- Where to find themes
- How to install themes
- How to configure themes
These videos are part of our comprehensive online Drupal training classes.
How to Build a WordPress Blog in Drupal
There's a phrase commonly used by Drupal fans:
"If you want to build a blog, use WordPress. If you want to bulld WordPress, use Drupal."
We actually had a very simular question from one of our members. They wanted to know how to make Drupal look like WordPress.
In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to replicate the basic WordPress blog features in Drupal.
How We Wrote the Best-Selling Drupal Book
We've been fortunate over the last couple of years to have great success with our CMS books.
Drupal 7 Explained launched in May and over the last few months it has become the best-selling Drupal book.
That book was the follow-up to Joomla! Explained which has been the best-selling Joomla book for over 2 years now.
How did we do it? Workflows.
We've taught hundreds of live classes over the last few years and based on student feedback, workflows are by the fast most popular teaching tool we've used.
Here's an introduction to how they help us teach and how they can help you too.
Add Captions to Drupal Images with jCaption
jCaption is a simple but very useful little module.
jCaption allows you to add captions to your Drupal images, no matter what editor you're using.
Using a small jQuery script you'll be able to add the captions and then use CSS classes to improve the design of those captions.
How to Uninstall a Drupal 7 Module
This tutorial will show you how to uninstall a module from your Drupal 7 site.
In this example, we're going to show you how to uninstall the Devel module. Devel is very useful for developing a site, but should be uninstalled before going live.
Track Hits and Show the Most Popular Drupal Content
Nearly every news and magazine site shows a list of the most popular content.
Drupal can track the popularity of content using only the core features.
Here's how to track the hits on your Drupal content and how to show those statistics.
One Content Item on Your Drupal Homepage
By default, Drupal ships with a blog on the homepage. Whenever you add new content, that can be pushed to the blog of many articles on the homepage.
However, smaller sites may not have a lot of fresh content for the homepage. They may not need to use a module as large as Panels to design a complicated layout.
Sometimes one piece of content on your homepage is all you need. Here's how to do that in Drupal:
A Drupal Dropdown List of Countries, States, Cities
We had a question from a member this week. He was collecting information from users and wanted to collect addresses:
"I need to have a user select a state in a list. My next requirement is to populate a new list with all the counties for the selected state."
It's easy to imagine many more people wanting to do something similar, so in this tutorial we'll explain how it's done.
A Video Introduction to Drupal 8
Recently we published a written introduction to Drupal 8 called, "The surprising thing about Drupal 8 is how unsurprising it is".
Last month, I gave a live version of that introduction at the Atlanta Drupal User's Group. Here's a video version of that presentation.
In this video, I'll give you a tour of the new features and admin interface changes in Drupal 8.
Video Introductions to Panels and Display Suite
Panels and Display Suite are two very popular Drupal modules.
Both Panels and Display Suite allow you to control the layout of your Drupal content without any code.
Last month we did a 2 part video series with Acquia, introducing both Panels and Display Suite.
Add a Block Region to a Drupal 7 Theme
In this tutorial, I will walk through the steps for adding a region to Drupal's Bartik theme. There are a couple ways you can do this.
- Modify the Bartik theme directly. Of course, this is not the suggested practice. In the Drupal community, we don't modify Drupal's core unless we are applying a patch.
- Copy the Bartik theme to the /sites/all/themes directory, rename the theme, and modify it to include the region you desire.
8 Recommended Themes for Drupal Beginners
"I downloaded Omega and Delta at the advice of an expert, but I'm really confused about how they work."
We hear a lot of support requests like this.
Themes can be confusing for Drupal beginners. We often speak with beginners who visit the theme page at Drupal.org and find the most popular themes at the top of the screen. They install Zen, Omega, AdaptiveTheme or Fusion and wonder why everything is so difficult.
A List of Every DrupalCamp Ever Held
Over the last few weeks we've been working on a project to show the growth of open source around the world.
The project will show the spread of open source events from 2006 until today.
However, we've been stuck on DrupalCamps. Almost no lists of DrupalCamps existed from before 2011. Both WordPress and Joomla have full lists of past events but nothing similar existed for Drupal. Until today.
5 Modules Allowing Drupal Users to Choose Permissions for Others
For large sites with large numbers of users, permissions can become a difficult issue.
One common situation is that site owners want to allow some users to control the permissions of other users.
In this tutorial, I'll show you Drupal's default user control permissions. Then I'll show you 5 modules for creating more sophisticated user control permissions.
Field Collection to Easily Re-use Drupal Fields
As with so many of the tutorials we write, this tutorial started as a question in our support forums.
One of our members wanted to set up three image fields and then re-use them across multiple content types.
Our solution was to recommend the Field Collection module.
Field Collection allows you (as the name implies) to collect some fields together into a group. You can then re-use those fields for multiple content types, users, comments or really whenever you add fields.
Here's how to use the Field Collection module.
Re-write Output from the Drupal 7 Media Module
One of the great things with Drupal is the ability to over-write just about anything!
We had a question in our support forums this week which put that ability to the test.
Our member wanted to provide a way for her clients to upload a PDF into a node and allow her users to easily download them. However, instead of a PDF icon and the title of the PDF, she wanted the link to say "Download PDF".