What Are Must Use Plugins in WordPress? The plugin system is one of the most powerful aspects of WordPress. The ability to extend the functionality of the CMS quickly and easily is unparalleled in other platforms. Plugins are typically installed and maintained through the WordPress administration interface, and end up in /wp-content/plugins/ in their own folder. There's an entirely different kind of plugin that exists though, and it's called a Must Use plugin.

In this post we're going to take a look at what they are and how they work, as well as, pros and cons of using them.

So you head outside for a break maybe to the park because it's a beautiful day. You're sitting there relaxing, and you get a call from a client asking for help with a site. If you're like me, you don't go anywhere without your iPad.  Can I help the client without leaving the serenity of the park?  The answer is, "Yeah, I can troubleshoot it right now from here." 

Let's take a look.

One of the problems in Drupal core "out of the box" is that you can pretty much use anything you want for a password.  And while your business might have a policy against weak passwords if Drupal doesn't enforce them, well, you know how people are. I get this question in training all the time, "How can we make users have strong passwords?" 

In this video, I want to talk about forcing strong passwords in Drupal 8 and 9. The solution is the Better Passwords module.

Keep reading to learn!

We've been posting blogs about Drupal for over 10 years at OSTraining, and so every once in a while someone finds an old blog post from Drupal 6 or even Drupal 7 and asks a question.  Well that's exactly what happened this week when somebody asked, "How do we display a pdf in the browser with Drupal 9 when someone clicks on a link?"

Keep reading to learn how!

Big Orange Heart made waves with their first online event back in January of 2021. And, this summer they are upping their game! The global 24 hour conference that starts tomorrow now has over 3000 attendees! But, it's not too late to register! 

Keep reading to learn more about the Summer WordFest Live 2021 speakers and sessions.

Unlike other CMSs, the update of Drupal core is not difficult, but somehow complicated because of all the details involved. In this tutorial, we are going to implement a local Drupal 9 installation, and then we will upload (push) this codebase to a central repository on Bitbucket. We will then download (pull) the codebase from this repository to the live server, where the website is going to be stored.  

Using this (terminal-oriented) process, you will be able to speed up Drupal core and module updates, and you will follow best practices. 

It is assumed that you already have a LAMP stack installed on your system. Furthermore, you require terminal access on your web server.

Keep reading to learn how!

(Transcript of the OSTips Video)

During this year's Drupalcon North America, Dries took to the stage at his DriesNote speech and mentioned that Drupal has never been more stable. The adoption rate for Drupal 9 is faster than any other version of Drupal ever and modules are ready for Drupal 9 faster than ever before. So of course, he went straight into Drupal 10...

Here we go again! The changes coming to Drupal 10! Let's dive in.

Learning programming is a challenging journey because there are a lot of routes you can choose to plan your training. In Java’s case, there are hundreds of books, online courses, and learning platforms designed to empower learners. On top of that, Java is the primary programming language taught in most CS curriculums.  OSTraining offers web languages like javascript and php, but CodeGym offers a unique way to learn Java!

In this post, we will review a popular Java tutorial platform among all-level Java students - Codegym. Programming users typically use it to accompany lecture courses or as a stand alone learning resource.

Let’s find out if CodeGym helps learn Java faster and stay engaged every step of the way.

Video Transcript:

"If you've installed or updated Acquia’s DevDesktop lately, you've seen this message:

And so you know that DevDesktop is approaching end of life.  

In this video, I'm going to give you two alternatives to Acquia’s DevDesktop For Local Drupal Development. You know I've used this software for years now and introduced literally thousands and thousands of people to Drupal using Acquia’s DevDesktop. It's a shame that it's going away, but we've got alternatives.

Let's dive in.

The process of migrating data into a Drupal database from a CSV file can be fulfilled through Drupal’s integrated Migrate API and three extra custom modules (Migrate Source CSV, Migrate Plus and Migrate Tools). 

This is known as the ETL (Extract - Transform - Load) process, in which data is fetched from one source in the first step, transformed in the second step, and finally loaded to its destination on the Drupal database in the third step. 

This tutorial will explain the creation of 12 book nodes for a library database.  Keep reading to learn how!

Recently I was thinking through the process of making a Travel website. We would have blog posts about specific resorts and then a custom taxonomy called Destinations that would hold things like “Hawaii” and “Canary Islands”. WordPress was built for this kind of thing, so sorting and organizing posts by these Destinations is fast and easy. 

The problem is, when I go to an Archive page of posts about Hawaii for example, our options for information about Hawaii are pretty limited. By default, terms can only have a Name, plain text Description, Slug, and a related Parent.

When writing the CSS code for your site, you can make use of CSS Custom Properties (Variables) to speed up the development process. You can use variables to define properties (size, color), which can then be applied to several elements.

That way, it is possible to have more control over the code and the design. Altering the value of a variable in one place overrides the value of that property everywhere it is invoked. 

This post will explain how to use CSS Variables and some practical applications. 

Let's start!

Insert CodePush notifications are a very useful marketing tool. Customers opt-in to them, because they are interested in your product or service.

With the free version of the Webpushr WP plugin, it is possible to manage a list of 10.000 users getting push notifications from your site at no cost.

This tutorial will explain the installation and basic configuration of the plugin.

Keep reading to learn how!

Let's create popups in WordPress with Popup Maker! Popups are an essential part of the graphical UI of a website. They provide additional content or are used to prompt for some interaction from the user. The main purpose of popups is to make this information stand out, by covering other parts of the graphical interface. 

There are different types of popups, they can be classified for example, according to their content: 

1. Opt-in e-mails
2. Videos
3. Registration forms
4. Images
5. etc

The Popup Maker plugin for WordPress helps developers to embed any kind of content inside a popup window, you can add conditions to filter the content to be presented. 

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

We are going to use Bootstrap 4 in Drupal 8/9 with Bootstrap Barrio. The Bootstrap Barrio theme for Drupal 8/9 integrates Bootstrap 4 (or Bootstrap 5 if you want) with your Drupal site. 

Bootstrap is a very popular framework for building websites. It provides designers and developers with a common language to communicate, making the development process a lot easier.

Creating a subtheme of Barrio is a straightforward process. This tutorial will explore the basic configuration options of the theme, which are managed through a complete graphical user interface.

Keep reading to learn how!

Big Orange Heart has wrapped up the WordFest Live 2021 online event! It was 24-hours long with some pretty impressive numbers to show afterwards.

Keep reading to see the numbers!

Big Orange Heart is making waves in the online event arena with their upcoming WordFest Live 2021 for the global WordPress community! One of the standout things, besides having over 2000 attendees, is the offering of 48 sessions by 48 different speakers over a 24-hour period to accommodate a global audience.

Keep reading to learn more about the WordFest Live 2021 speakers and sessions.

Big Orange Heart has been working for more than nine months to bring a unique experience for people to gather at online. Opting for the term “Festival” over “Conference”, they are hoping to create an experience that reduces the cognitive load that some virtual events have required. They believe tech shouldn’t be the barrier to connect with a community, the WordPress community in this case.

Keep reading to learn more about WordFest Live 2021.

Custom fields have been around for more than a decade, and custom meta boxes nearly as long. Although, it can feel like they’re fading from usefulness in this age of Gutenberg, they still fulfill a very important role in information management in WordPress.

Providing an intuitive interface for your users is key to building something that people will actually want to use.

Let's take a look!

We are excited to be a sponsor for the online, WordFest Live event this year! And, we'll write more about the event in upcoming blog posts, but in this first post, we wanted to spread the word about Big Orange Heart, the non-profit organization behind this free, global WordPress event.

The proceeds from the event will go to help support the organization's delivery of their services - services that since the pandemic have become even more needed worldwide.

Millions of people around the world have lost their jobs in 2020, forced to stay at home, taking their knowledge and wisdom with them. In many cases, these people (maybe you?) could build an online course teaching the skills and knowledge you have. You can provide other people with skills they can use to better their own life, and make enough money yourself to not only weather 2020, but perhaps build a long term business.

To be clear, this isn’t working for someone else or being paid by an employer, but rather building something yourself leveraging what you already know. 

There are already hundreds of stories of people like Yoga instructors making courses and videos at home and selling access to them. Stylists, makeup artists, welders, cabinet makers; people from all walks of life can build their own website and teach what they already know.

This post will give you some real world examples of how people have built their own sites, and then show you what tools they used, so you can learn to build online courses with WordPress, teaching what you already know.

We have a previous blog on how to make images background using CSS by Valentin Garcia, but we wanted to update and expand upon the topic.

In this post, we’ll talk about the background-size property and explore some other nifty background image properties that can help with our design.

Let's get started!

There are many tasks in WordPress that are extremely repetitive. Things that get coded over and over again by developers, even though the result is the same every time.

Custom Post Types are a perfect example. The code to make them is the same in the end, it’s the settings that change each time. Taxonomies and meta boxes are similar. This is why tools like GenerateWP exist. You can simply fill out a form and get a fully functioning code block.

Another way to manage this kind of code is with a library. A library is a piece of code that knows how to generate that code the same way every time, accepting only a few settings to build what you want.

Following the Custom Post Types thread, there’s an excellent PHP Library from John Blackbourn called Extended CPTs. If you include it with your plugin or theme, you can simply add a few lines of code and get a full Custom Post Type. It can also handle Taxonomies. Another great example is meta boxes. They can be quite complicated, but a library can standardize the code and help remove errors.

BUT!  There's a bit of a problem. 

Let's dive in and take a look at the problem and the solution.

So you're working away on your Drupal site using Acquia’s DevDesktop just like we do here at OSTraining, and you want to take a snapshot of your site to use for another project. Or maybe you just want to keep a backup of it at a certain state in your Drupal site development.

In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to create Drupal site copy in Acquia’s DevDesktop.  It's really simple. 

Let's get to It.

You are online because you want to be found by people over the internet. That is an assumption. However, it applies to most cases. 

To be found over the internet, your site has (is almost obligated) to be registered on at least one search engine - Google being the most important one.

You have to create an XML sitemap for your WordPress site and submit it to Google. There is a Google XML SItemaps plugin which accomplishes this task in a very user-friendly way.

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

Today we're going to talk about Filezilla, and a really cool little trick that'll make your life much easier.

So have you been in Filezilla trying to edit your files whether they're php files or text files, and it always opens up in Notepad? It's really frustrating to find things, because there's no color coding.  Maybe you would prefer TextWrangler or Sublime.

Well, you can change that Notepad default inside of Filezilla so that it always opens up in your preferred editor. It'll only take you a few seconds to do this, and in this video I show you how.

Let's take a look.

Have you ever wanted to add floating action buttons to your WordPress site to boost conversion rates? Perhaps you’d like a call to action button for people to phone you or visit your social media sites.

If so, Buttonizer is a fantastic and super easy plugin to accomplish adding floating action buttons on your site.

Find out how!