A Drupal5 Sandbox

There are several contrib modules for Drupal whose main purpose is to embed third party applications so they can be administered within Drupal. An example of this type is the Gallery module which embeds Gallery 2 into Drupal.

It can be very confusing for first-timers to use this type of contrib module because they somehow miss the fact that, in addition to the Drupal contrib module, they also need to download the third-party application from somewhere else and then install and configure it to work with Drupal. I managed to set up Gallery 2 in Drupal via the Gallery module and you can see the result of my test by clicking either the image on the right sidebar or the Gallery link on the left sidebar.

Not bad. However, I'm thinking what advantages are there to have all types of content within the control of a CMS? For one, many more types of content can be brought under the search and retrieval mechanisms of the CMS. What advantages are there to have some types taken cared of by external third-party applications and just linked to from Drupal? Storage and bandwidth perhaps especially if you use Flickr or YouTube to host your media files.

Woohoo! Done. My first update experience with Drupal (from 5 beta 2). So now, we should be on the just released Drupal 5.0 (and the latest stable version of CiviCRM 1.6). Lots of stuff to test, dearlings. But first, I need to catch up with lessons at Drupal-Dojo, the new learning group at groups.drupal.org, so I can be a better teacher here.

By default, Drupal presents you a plain text area into which you can go ahead and write text that will be formatted with basic paragraphs and line breaks and some allowable HTML tags (Filtered HTML). Further formatting can be done by selecting other options under Input Format (PHP code or Full HTML). In older versions of Drupal, you can install an WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE (http://drupal.org/project/tinymce) to format your content. For 5.2, there is a new WYSIWYG editor called widgEditor (http://drupal.org/project/widgeditor) which I am now testing.So I see a graphical interface on which I can select to make my text bold and/or italic, insert a hyperlink, make ordered and unordered lists or insert an image. I can also switch to the HTML source and do my editing there. There is a drop-down box where I can select the block type to which my formatting applies (paragraph - the default - and heading levels 1 to 6. Let's try inserting an image: I click the icon to insert an image, I get this  message:I enter the location of the above snapshot itself which I print-screen-captured, cropped, saved, and uploaded to my server. I then get this additional message:Ah. I don't find this a helpful way to insert images. It requires you to know the full path to your images. It is hard for users to determine relative paths in Drupal. I might as well just have hardcoded it into the text. What's really helpful in inserting images into text is to have a way of browsing your computer and or server where you store your images or a way of finding out the location more easily. The existing feature to attach files in Drupal does this but you cannot use it to position the image within the text.  I'll look at other modules that will take care of this without asking the user to know and enter manually the locations of his/her images.