Tag: weblog

I just finished the first pass at upgrading this blog to Drupal 5.0. Looks like almost everything is working right out of the gate. I hit a few minor glitches:

1. spam.module has a strange bug, where it fails to display nodes with ID larger than 1519. Node 1520 and higher failed to display at all until I disabled spam.module and switched to Akismet.
2. CCK – my bikelog is MIA. not the end of the world – actually, I’d hoped to just go ahead and retire it and do what normal/sane people do: get a cyclecomputer. But, enough people find their way to that page from the CCK/Calculated Fields page that I’ll give ‘er a shot when I get a chance.
3. The K2-derived theme I’d been using borks under D5. Again, not the end of the world. I’ll take a look at upgrading it later. For now, I’m kinda liking the new default Garland theme… Theme updated. Borrowed snippits from Garland to get the scripts etc… properly included.
4. TinyMCE appears to be shy. It’s installed and enabled, but refuses to show up. Again, not the end of the world, as I’d just as often write raw text/html or use Performancing for Firefox, which works just fine.
   Update: I grabbed FCKEditor, and it’s doing a decent job. I miss having the user setting that let me turn off rich text editing by default, so it doesn’t bork embeded code, but maybe FCKEditor doesn’t do that…. Bork embedded code, I mean.
   I’m really not a fan of FCKEditor’s lack of semantic markup (using br br instead of wrapping paragraphs in p elements, for example) but it works.
5. The code I’ve been using to automatically generate the colophon (list of active modules, etc…) borks under Drupal 5.

There may be other gotchas. I did the upgrade on my desktop box, then moved it into place so I’m relatively sure nothing is pouring smoke…

OK. I think I've just about gotten things closer to "feeling" right for me here. I was just fiddling with the Image and img_assist , and the drupalimage TinyMCE plugin, and finally got them all behaving as expected. Now, I can post an image to the blog while writing an entry, and it goes one step further than what WordPress did.

Drupal will create a completely independent "Image" content node, with full title/description/tag "metadata" and add it to an Image Gallery for later browsing and reuse. It's not just a file slapped in a folder on a server. It's a file slapped in a folder, with a bunch of supporting content and metadata to help organize it. That is so much more powerful/flexible than the straight "upload image" used by other blog apps.

So, I'm using the stock "Image" content type, with the "img_assist" module providing the upload service, and the "drupalimage" TinyMCE plugin providing a handy button right in the WYSIWYG editor to make it easy peasy to add images on the fly.

And, because it ties to the stock "Image" content type, I can also use things like the Image Publishing module to allow iPhoto to upload images directly to my copy(ies) of Drupal, for later use in blog posts and other content.

There are some minor wrinkles to iron out, then I'll roll it out to all of the Drupal sites we're running at work. Should be a handy way for our users to publish images – at least for the ones without Flickr accounts…

Screenshot of Drupal Image Upload: This is a screenshot of the Drupal img_assist image upload form, triggered by the drupalimage plugin for the TinyMCE module.

 

Update: The HTMLArea module/editor has a similar image insert/upload utility. That one is even more streamlined, with less emphasis on creating a separate Image node (although that's what it does). Here's the HTMLArea utility, for comparison:

HTMLArea image insert/upload utility: A screenshot of the HTMLArea image insert/upload utility, taken from SocialLearning.ca – running Drupal 4.6

Update 2: Looks like a bug in img_assist.module, which is adding some well-intentioned spans that are inadvertently borking image display on Mozilla browsers. By commenting out lines 1263 and 1287 of img_assist.module, everything appears to be hunky dory.