Verbosity 2.0 ~ Talking about life on Drupal

I finally made it out to a real Drupal event!  Not just a local meetup... so much more than that.

The two-day educational networking event took place at North Studio - a Victoria web development firm which also does a lot of work in the computer training department.  Our schedule started with a focus on the basics: installation of Drupal, SEO techniques, a dash of Information Architecture and more.  That was all really valuable stuff, but for me it was a bit redundant.  If you've been following my threads for the past year you will probably understand what I mean.

What I Learned

The presentation on Actions, Triggers and Rules by Dave Tarc was insightful.  I have worked with Actions and Triggers on Drupal 6 and the Workflow-NG module for Drupal 5.  Rules takes over where Workflow-NG left off.  Essentially this module just lets you add some rudimentary logic to your Triggers so you can automate things on the site.  What could be better than automating things?  In my world: not much.

Are you tired of resizing your images, saving them, uploading them, only to find out that you need to do the whole process over again because you forgot to size the images correctly?

That was editing for the web a decade ago but it doesn't have to be that way any longer.  With Drupal you can manage your images online and this tutorial will show you one way that it can be done.

This howto is based on a Surrey Drupal User's group discussion where Ryan Dempsey talked about his favourite recipe for managing images.  This howto extends that discussion with the addition of some additional "nice to have" modules.

The good news? You can do most anything you need/want to do to images with Drupal.  The bad news?  Some fringe coding might be necessary to make it totally awesome. 

Drupal can make your website fully capable of managing images in a sane and logical way so we don't have to manually resize our images ever again.

Using Core Components aka. The Old Way

This collection of links originally appeared on my consulting website.  If you are a developer new to using Linux or Unix systems these guides will probably come in handy at some point.  Enjoy.

Editing modern CMS-based sites usually means a bit of HTML editing.  More often than not there is some kind of editor built-in with the application framework you are using to facilitate this.  On Drupal you choose whichever editor you think works best.  For me the choice was simple - FCKeditor.  Why FCK? It supports a lot of browsers and is built in a modular fashion.  So there are many different ways you can use it.

Before we get started there are a few decisions to make about how you want to integrate with Drupal.

Choosing Your Module

You can use the "Wysiwyg API" module if you are interested in using the editor for everyone of a specific input format (think "Filtered HTML", etc).  This new module allows you to download the current FCK codebase and permission against that and only that.  It is limited but growing in popularity due to the number of other editors that are supported by this module.  If you need more than one editor this is your best bet.