Stephen Burge's Blog, page 172

WordPress Plugin Favorites Explained in a Video

Earlier this year WordPress added a favorite plugin feature.

This feature allows you to create a list of all plugins you really like.

Your favorite plugin list is stored on WordPress.org so that you can access it on all of your sites. You can also view other peoples' favorites.



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DrupalCon Prague Keynote with Aral Balkan

The Friday morning keynote at DrupalCon Prague was entitled "Experience Driven Open Source" by Aral Balkan.

Speaking to a room full of very smart "geeks" is a tough challenge. You need to be relevant and speak at the audience's level, but you also need to be interesting and somewhat entertaining - especially on the Friday morning of a DrupalCon!

Aral Balan's keynote certainly fulfilled all of the above criteria. I think you'll find this keynote both challenging and enjoyable.

Aral explains his ideas of designing for the experience in open source and about giving the end user the choice of who owns their data.



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Learning Launch: WordPress Mobile Web Development

Members of OSTraining now get a new e-book every month.

This month's book is WordPress Mobile Web Development. This book by Rachel McCollin teaches you how to build responsive sites with WordPress.

You'll learn how to build mobile and responsive websites using WordPress
You'll get to grips with the best mobile plugins and understand how they interact with your site
You'll learn how to make your own WordPress theme or site responsive, including layout, images, navigation and more


This book is over 330 pages long and has a 4.6 out of 5 rating on Amazon.



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Certificates Now Available for All OSTraining Classes

No matter what class you take at OSTraining, if you complete the quizzes, you now get a downloadable certificate.

Certificates have been available for several months, but we've now gone back and added quizzes to every class.

How do the certificates work?

Inside every class, you'll find quizzes. These quizzes come after 5 or 6 videos and the questions are designed to help to remember what you just saw.
If you score more than 70% on a quiz, you pass.
If you complete all the quizzes in a class, you get the certificate for that class. 
You can download all your certificates by clicking "Account" then "My certificates".




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Delivering Joomla Email via Mandrill

We send almost all of the emails from OSTraining via a service called Mandrill.

Why would we use a 3rd party to deliver the email that our site creates? 

In a word: Deliverability. Mandrill is run by the team at MailChimp and their entire business revolves around making sure that emails get delivered, rather han hitting the spam folder. We think that more of our site's users will get our emails if we rely on Mandrill. We weren't able to track stats with Joomla's default emails, but with Mandrill our deliverability is around 98.5%.

Here's how to use Mandrill on your Joomla site.



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Easily Build Joomla Components with Component Creator

During the last 8 years, developers have created 10,000's of components for Joomla.

Some of the work involved in creating an extension can be fairly tedious. There are installation packages to build, database tables to created and layout files to generate.

Component Creator from Jensen technologies allows you to automate all of those tedious tasks. It will help you to create your own installable components without typing a single line of code.

Here's how Component Creator works:



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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.



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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.



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Learning Launch: the Drupal Rules Module

Our latest video class covers Rules for Drupal.

Rules is a powerful module that is used to automate actions on your Drupal site.

With the Rules module, you select an event (for example, a new article is written) and then specify an action (for example, an email is sent to the site administrator).



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Changing Your Joomla Template Background

Lately, I've received requests to implement a feature that will change the background of a website on each page visit.

I have to admit, it took me some time to learn how to do it by myself. I thought about sharing my experience with a larger audience.

This step-by-step tutorial explaining how to achieve this using a real template in a real situation.



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