Steve’s Blog

Drupal Users Have Their Own Workspace

This week’s tutorial is the first of a two-parter. We’ve had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors … blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal’s default handling of nodes.

This week we’ll show you how to give each person their own control panel for their nodes. This will allow them to much more easily see, understand and update the content they’ve submitted. Without it they’d be reduced to searching and guessing their way through the site to find their content.

Next week we’ll focus on how to create a workflow and allow nodes to pass through several approval steps before publication.

In order to give each person their own control we’re going to use a module called “Workspace”:

Continue reading “Drupal Users Have Their Own Workspace”

Read MoreDrupal Users Have Their Own Workspace

K2 – the Missing Documentation (Part 2)

K2 JoomlaThe hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.

Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. Last week in Part 1 we covered the main administrator parts of K2:

  • Installing K2
  • The K2 dashboard
  • K2 categories
  • K2 fields and field groups
  • K2 items

If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you go back and read Part 1 first. This week we’re going to focus on the frontend of K2.

Continue reading “K2 – the Missing Documentation (Part 2)”

Read MoreK2 – the Missing Documentation (Part 2)
admin praise

Yes, Joomla Admin Templates Are Worthwhile

Back in mid-2008, Kyle from JoomlaPraise.com approached me about writing a guest post. He was trying to promote AdminPraise, a new design for the Joomla administrator area.

I was sceptical. Very. So sceptical that I asked him to basically defend the need for AdminPraise. His guest post became Are Joomla Admin Templates Worthwhile?.

Fast-forward to early 2009 and I was able to review the next version AdminPraise2 and say: “No-one else is building administrator templates”. I didn’t see the point and it seemed many others didn’t either.

Now in 2010, I’ve got this to say: Kyle, you were right. I was wrong.

Continue reading “Yes, Joomla Admin Templates Are Worthwhile”

Read MoreYes, Joomla Admin Templates Are Worthwhile

How to Block Spam Comments in WordPress

AkismetHave you heard people complain that Windows computers get more viruses and Apple computers?

There are many reasons for that but one of the ones most commonly stated is that there are just so many more Windows computers out there. They make a much more inviting target. The same is true with WordPress sites. They make up around 2% of all websites and so are a very attractive target. It’s common for WordPress beginners to end up with 100s of spam comments on their posts.

The solution? Akismet.com. They provide a great spam-blocking service. You’ll need it … around 83% of all comments are spam.

Continue reading “How to Block Spam Comments in WordPress”

Read MoreHow to Block Spam Comments in WordPress

K2 – the Missing Documentation (Part 1)

K2 JoomlaThe hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.

Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. For example, this is part of a K2 article about a camera called the Canon EOS Rebel:

K2 Additional Information

Beyond just an article, you can add information about:

  • Price
  • Weight
  • Color
  • A link for more information

You can also add tags, videos, photo galleries, comments and more. You can see the full Canon EOS Rebel example article here.

That is the essential benefit of K2 … you can create articles with far more information and features.

 

Continue reading “K2 – the Missing Documentation (Part 1)”

Read MoreK2 – the Missing Documentation (Part 1)

Update All Your Social Networks From Drupal

Would you like to be able to update your Drupal site and automatically send those updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites?

This tutorial will show you how.

Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export new posts. From there we’ll use Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.

 

Continue reading “Update All Your Social Networks From Drupal”

Read MoreUpdate All Your Social Networks From Drupal

Using WordPress as a CMS

We teach three kinds of website software: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. At each class people bring different preconceived notions:

  • Drupal: “This stuff is really hard, right?”
  • Joomla: “This stuff is a quirky, right?”
  • WordPress: “This stuff isn’t very powerful, right?”

Our job is to convince them they’re wrong. One of the reasons people think WordPress isn’t powerful is because they believe it can’t be used to build an ordinary website with static pages.

Continue reading “Using WordPress as a CMS”

Read MoreUsing WordPress as a CMS

4 Joomla Classes for the Price of 1 in London and San Francisco

London Joomla ClassOne is warm, sunny and on the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

The other is cold, rainy and on the grey Thames (I’m allowed to make fun of it … I was born in its suburbs)

San Francisco and London and nearly 5500 miles apart and you might not think they have much in common. Normally you’d be right, but this is an exception.

Next week we’ve got two Joomla classes, one in each city:

Continue reading “4 Joomla Classes for the Price of 1 in London and San Francisco”

Read More4 Joomla Classes for the Price of 1 in London and San Francisco

Installing Joomla Locally on Your P.C.

Following on from other newsletters where we showed you how to set up Joomla on a Mac and also how to develop locally and moving your site to a live server, this week we’re going to walk you through installing Joomla locally, on a P.C..

We’re going to use WAMP for this tutorial.

WAMP stands for “Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP” which are the different elements that allow you to run Joomla on your computer.

Here’s how you do it:

Continue reading “Installing Joomla Locally on Your P.C.”

Read MoreInstalling Joomla Locally on Your P.C.