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By theworldawaits on
Hey there,
I'm having quite a lot of difficulty getting a basic content management system going on here. The website is for a Child Protection agency here in Nairobi and their tech skills are limited so it needs to be very simple to update.
I have never used Drupal before this project. I installed FCKeditor on a custom theme I ported and followed all the manual steps.
My hope was to achieve a few of these relatively simple (or so I thought) tasks:
1) A place to enter/edit text. When you've entered all the text... you highlight headers/quotes... select from a dropdown menu of your already defined styles (ex. BodyHeader.. BodySubheader.. blockquote etc)... and what you see is (roughly) what you get.
2) When you have two paragraphs.. you type out one.. hit enter.. and type out the other. The pubished text appears as two blocks.
3) You upload a picture through this format and it actually appears in the content. :)
This all seems simple enough... but currently none of it is working. When I type out paragraphs or apply text styles it all appears in one big block... with no formatting. Even when I hit shift-enter for
the text appears this way. When I use the simple text editor (no FCKeditor) the formatting seems to be OK (but of course no image upload or easy style adjustments). Has anybody experienced these problems before? I thought it might be my custom theme but I tried on BlueMarine and experienced the same problems.
I really want to apologize for my incompetence. I've been stuck at this roadblock for the past few days and it's really frustrating. The internet here is very slow (and goes down for hours/days at a time due to the skirmishes here). It's making it difficult to thoroughly research these issues and get this site up and running.
And on a side note.. I hope it doesn't come to this.. but I need to see what my options are. This site needs to be completed before my Kenyan VISA expires (fairly soon). Is there anywhere I can hire somebody who knows what they're doing? I'm doing this website on a volunteer basis which is not an issue but the whole Drupal side of things is driving me crazy. I'd be willing to pay out of my own pocket if it means having a working WYSIWYG with my CSS styles and easy image upload. Please let me know about possible options here... thanks!
Comments
I don't have experience with your issues
So I can't exactly help out. However, I would ask is Drupal definitely the right tool. As you are discovering D in its current capacity has a strong developer slant, which can make it more complex for designers to implement. There are other packages out there than can probably give you what you want out of the box.
When I was considering what to develop an e-magazine in I looked at Drupal, Joomla and Expression Engine. Joomla was too restrictive, too slow and didn't have SEO. Drupal and EE were my two choices. Drupal is more flexible, powerful, runs bigger sites but comes at a price.
EE is probably the best, simple content managenment system out there. I write for a baseball site that uses EE and it is a fantastic package. It does have some limitations for sure but for 95% of projects is fine. It doesn't have the flexibility of Drupal and isn't entirely free (not expensive either). They do actually release a "core" version for free which may do most of what you want. The one bonus of it is that it has a really inutitive UI and is super easy to theme
If I was going to do a simple site I would probably plump for EE
You can read more about it here: http://drupal.org/node/215719
I have some comments to add to that thread on some of its limitations -- that is on my to do list.
EDIT: I should add I choose drupal for my site. The reason: my desire to learn the system. Had i just wanted to develop my site as fast as possible I'd have gone for EE
Although departing from
Although departing from Drupal is tempting... I think it's best if I learn the system (as you chose to do). Also -- the organization I'm developing this site for is a non-profit organization. Their funds are always better used for programs empowering/protecting children... so the cost (however small) probably won't get past the director here. Thanks for the suggestion though... I will look into it for future projects.
Fine
EE Core is absolutely free and can probably do all you need it to do. Also if you are on visa constraints this may not be the best place to learn Drupal. The learning curve is fairly steep unless you have some coding experience. In this case EE Core may be your best solution as everything is integrated.
Personally I would put Drupal on your localhost and continue to tinker with it but get the site you need up and running in EE. One other issue with Drupal is that once you have developed it the site can be hard to maintain unless you have someone who knows Drupal and knows the configuration. As EE is integrated it is very easy to maintain and update.
The baseball site I work with chose EE precisely for this reason. The editor could do all the updating himself without having to call an expert in.
Ultimately you need to weigh up time, resource, cost, personal experience in all this. What is most important. If you do have time and do want to learn Drupal then stick with it. If your getting this site finished on time is more critical and you are constrained in that area then you may want to think more about the value of switching. Also it seems as though I am plugging EE here -- and I do think it is the best solution for smaller sites. However, Joomla is also very easy to use out of the box. Or even something like WordPress could work ....
Ok... checking it out now.
Ok... checking it out now. Already it seems much more friendly....
I'm just a little concerned about all the hours I've put into learning Drupal... I guess I'll explore both CCK and EE and make my choice.
I still like Drupal... but it definitely seems slanted towards code-savvy people. As a designer it doesn't play to my strengths at all!
Thanks again for your advice... I hope I will find a working solution before my VISA expires!
Cheers,
Jason
In my opinion, wysiwyg
In my opinion, wysiwyg editors are not a simple, low-tech solution. Most wysiwyg editors are complex tools that will allow a lot of freedom - more than you probably want to provide. The risk of wysiwyg editors is that site maintainers break the design. There are some alternatives:
- Widgeditor (http://drupal.org/project/widgeditor) is a very simple editor with limited possibilities.
- WYMeditor (http://drupal.org/project/wymeditor) is an editor which gives a visual representation of the document structure. It doesn't allow for styling (colors, fonts, sizes) but instead, it encourages the editor to structure his document in terms of headings and paragraphs. Unfortunately, it's still in beta. you would have to see if it already suits your needs.
- The easiest and best solution, IMHO, would be to use CCK. Don't try to provide all functionality in one tool (the wysiwyg editor) but split it into separate form fields: header, body text, first image, second image. All styling is done automatically in the template. This way, nobody can make mistakes, mess up a lay-out or get stuck in complicated editors. Of course, the image will not imediately show up in the text, but is that a problem? The preview button will provide enough feedback. To create paragraphs, you could use the core Filter module. I don't know exactly how to do it, but on http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/filter it says "So, for example, you can use a filter to turn ordinary line breaks into HTML paragraph tags."
I hope this helps. Good luck!
Thanks for your comment. I
Thanks for your comment. I am intrigued by the CCK solution.... will look into it more thoroughly! Hopefully it's the solution I've been looking for.
Perhaps I'm naive... but it seems to me that providing a simple and effective way to style and manage content would be a big priority for any content management system. I'm new to the game though... so I'm probably not taking a lot into consideration... btu wow.. it appears to be quite complicated to implement a little CSS styling rules to generated content. Part of the adventure I guess... :)
Applying css rules to
Applying css rules to generated content is not so difficult. Drupal adds a lot of id's and class names by default. You can use these for your css selectors. When you have Firefox with the firebug plugin, you can just edit the css and see the effect in real time. Once you're satisfied, you put that css in your template's style.css. Of course, finally you will have to check if it works in IE as well.
You have to keep in mind that content management and content styling are two completely different things. Content management actually gets easier if you don't have to worry about the styling.
Please note that I am not trying to pursuade you to choose Drupal instead of EE, you'll have to make that choice yourself. I just hope that I can help you decide by explaining what Drupal could do for you.
Contemplate
If you do go for Drupal + cck, contemplate is also a good module for theming.
By the way if you go for EE and need some help, let me know. Your project (cause) looks interesting and I am happy to help out
EDIT
By the way EE has CCK "lite" built it. You can add fields as you like. Not as powerful as Drupal CKK as hard, for instance, to add image fields ... but good functionality none the less.
After some trouble-shooting
After some trouble-shooting and a suggestion from another post... it appears I'm quite simply very dense (as previously suspected). :P
It appears I was using filtered HTML and that's why my CSS and formatting wasn't working correctly.
I also realized one of the php files for FCKeditor had incorrect file paths for my images. I still don't know how to set it correctly (I'm running Drupal locally through MAMP) but when I edit it in the html text the images appear.
Things appear to be working more or less how I had hoped. They were such simple problems... but I spent so long troubleshooting other paths. Argh... just a small taste of the world of coding/troubleshooting. I apologize for the negative tone of my previous posts.
I'm still far from reaching content management nirvana... but I'm further along the path.
It looks like I'll be staying with Drupal.. thanks again for your input everyone.
Cheers,
Jason
Hey good luck
You came to the same decision as me! The journey is rewarding and frustrating.
All the best