Stephen Burge's Blog, page 76

Faster and Better OSTraining Support

Training videos are great. But, they are not enough.

Videos can't solve specific problems with your site. Videos can't help you when an emergency strikes. Videos can't hold a conversation with you.

Our members agree. Over 70% of OSTraining members choose a membership that includes support.

So, we've been improving OSTraining support to make it as fast and easy as possible:



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Drupal 8 and the EU Cookie Consent Law

One of our OSTraining members asked how to add a cookie notification message to their Drupal 8 site.

We recommended the CookieConsent module which provides an easy solution to deal with the EU's Cookie Law.

Adding a cookie notification is particularly useful if you want to do more with cookies. For example, it's illegal to use SuperCookies without consent.



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Using Google's URL Shortener Tool

An OSTraining member asked how he could add a long external link to their site.

Generally you want to keep URLs short so you can share them and embed them into your page (long URLs can break on small screens).

I recommended the Google URL shortener tool. It's easy to use and can also provide analytics for you.



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Use Drupal Console and Composer For Faster Development

One of our OSTraining members asked us about the best way to install Composer to manage dependencies.

While Composer can be used to add module dependencies in Drupal, it's more practical to also use DrupalConsole to handle the process. Console automatically passes the requests to Composer. 

From the terminal command line running the following commands will install both Console and Composer together.



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10 Ways to Design Your Site for Accessibility

I'm frustrated with modern web design. And I'm certainly frustrated with most theme and template designers who sell their work without checking for global accessibility.

Many designers actually take good, accessible CMSs and then create designs with big accessibility problems.

I'm a lawyer, website designer and accessibility / diversity consultant in Australia. Having advised the corporate, government and education sectors, I 
find a lot of sites are not accessible and offer many users a bad experience.



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What are .htaccess files ?

An OSTraining member was recently confused about .htaccess files.
 
The member wondered what .htaccess files are for and why some sites use more than one .htaccess file.



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Restricting Access to Content in Drupal 8

One of our OSTraining members wanted to restrict access to certain content on his Drupal 8 site.

To do this in Drupal 8, we are going to use the Content Access module.

To follow along with this tutorial, download and install Content Access. I found no errors while using this module, but please note that currently it is a dev release.



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Improve The Drupal 8 Admin Menu for Content Creators

The Drupal admin interface needs to keep a lot of people happy. The admin interface is often used by everyone from very experienced users to complete beginners.

One of our members asked if it was possible to create a custom menu for their content creators. They wanted one single place for Drupal beginners to find all the links they needed.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to do that and also create a faster, more usable admin menu.



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How to Clone a Joomla Page for Admin Editing

We get this type of question often: "How can I clone a page, hide it, and preview the edits without users seeing it?"

And usually the admin would like to make the page available for other admins, but definitely not for users.

This tutorial will show you exactly how to accomplish this objective. Let's get started.



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Display Your Category Hierarchy in a WordPress Widget

One of our members at OSTraining set up an ecommerce site using Easy Digital Downloads. She wanted to create a widget to show the store's categories to visitors. However, she could only get the top level categories to display.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a widget that can show any number or level of WordPress categories.



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