pictures in posts
doctorpaul - April 8, 2008 - 17:45
Drupal 5.7
Here's another thing which I thought would be easy and is not (for me!).
It's about putting images into stories.
My ideal workflow goes like this:
- User submits story in plain text only
- Users are not allowed to edit their own stories
- Story gets published automatically
- Soon afterwards, admin edits story and, optionally, adds picture to the story
How can this be done? i m confuzd! :-)
1. User submits story in
Limit authenticated users (or whichever role you give authors) the "Filtered HTML" input format and limit the tags you allow. I've not tried it with no tags-- that might work.
Just be sure the "edit" and "edit own" permissions are unchecked for the applicable content types for the author role at admin/user/access
Be sure the "Published" option under the "Workflow" section is checked for the desired content types at admin/content/types
Install the image module(s) (or other image handling module) and only give permissions to the admins for adding pictures.
Thanks for the great
Thanks for the great instructions. points 1-2-3-no problem - very good - thanks.
However - as usual - I am not knowledgable enough to understand a piece of this - namely number 4.
I have now installed the image module but I cannot see HOW you actually upload images or how you get them to appear in posts.
I got an image to appear aBOVE a post but I want it IN the post.
What am I doing wrong? DO I have to use in the post?
Sorry to all the dudes who know what they're doing and think this is dumb. But Drupal is DIFFICULT - compared to Wordpress and BLogger which is where I've been up to now.
How are you editing your
How are you editing your posts? The standard drupal text box or did you add some type of editor?
standard box I did try to
standard box
I did try to add FCK editor last week but had problems installing and gave up. I decided I wanted to do more research before choosing a WYSIWYG editor and I might even decide to leave things plain... not sure.
But right now - its the standard text box
update - now I can get a picture in my posts - via It still seems pretty long winded to do it this way. I guess I need an editor?
For the standard text box, I
For the standard text box, I (and my other content editors) use http://drupal.org/project/img_assist (or simply add the IMG tags manually). But I noticed that the image module includes an "image_attach" module as well... not sure how that works but it might be worth a look. For an editor (for my less technical content editors) I use FCKeditor which includes a file/image browser for inserting links and images. There's also the IMCE module which integrates with Tinymce.
The image module is just one such image handling module which creates images as nodes. There are others which just treat images as files-- IMCE is one of the those.
There's also the asset module for image/media handling which I've heard good things about but haven't tried yet.
In general, image/media handling is a bit of a mess as there are a number of modules / methods for handling it, it's just a matter of trying them and seeing which one "fits" you better.
Thanks for taking the time
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
It's good to hear someone more experienced saying what I suspected - that image adding is a bit of a mess in Drupal.
Hearing that makes me feel less like I've missed something blindingly obvious. Perhaps another attempt with a WYSIWYG them. Perhaps just now...
I read on one of the tutorial pages last night that people should stop complaining about Drupal being difficult and embrace it's flexibility.
I will embrace it's felxibility but that doesn't erase the fact that it is DIFFICULT!
lol, true enough.
lol, true enough. Unfortunately, I find that flexibility almost always comes at the price of usability. It's usually a rarity that something very flexible is also very easy to use.... and that's not limited to CMS's. It's a general observation from a former human factors engineer.
Having said that, the good news is that both Dries and the community are very well aware of this particular shortcoming and there is good work being done toward resolving it. Not only for images, but media files in general (images, audio, video, etc.). Also, the wysiwyg problem is getting attention. There are some very promising modules on the horizon-- personally, I'm keeping my eyes on http://drupal.org/project/nicedit and http://drupal.org/project/editor.
I think I agree with your
I think I agree with your overall observation about flexability vs usability.
And I have to ask - what is a HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEER?
It sounds great!
I've been banging my head
I've been banging my head against images and editors for most of today.
Is there a consensus on the best editor to use with Drupal, for those not familiar with editing?
I just built a simple site for my gardener, and am not sure if there is a better option. I'm using Drupal 6.2, and Niceditor, as I previously had problems with Fckeditor.
Problem 1 is that when I click on the image icon in the editor, the window only prompts me for a URL. Isn't there a way of automatically uploading an image straight into the post?
Or does he have to upload an image to an invisible gallery, and then right-click on it to find out the address, then go back to the post and paste in that URL?
Problem 2 is that after entering the URL, the text doesn't float around the image nicely. Am I really going to have to tell him to go into code mode, and add align="left" to the img statement?
cheers
Is there a consensus on the
There are as many opinions on that as people using Drupal, lol. Personally, I like FCKeditor atm, but you mention have problems with it.
There's a high level review of sorts of current wysiwyg editors at http://drupal.org/node/208456
The IMCE module works with both fckeditor and tinymce editor. There's also the image assist module, a new module called "img package" but I haven't looked at it yet, and another module called "Asset" that also looks promising. Also, the "image" module comes with a module called "image attach", but I haven't tried that one yet either. Unfortunately, there is no "one size fits all" answer to this question yet. Your best bet is to load them up and try them out.
You can set up a custom filter (with http://drupal.org/project/flexifilter or http://drupal.org/project/customfilter) for this-- to locate every img tag and format it however you like.
Image attach lets you upload
Image attach lets you upload a new image to a node.
The module is currently limited to just one image attached per node.
The image is itself created as a new node, so you can also put it in galleries, etc.
Optionally, you can also allow attaching of existing image nodes to nodes.
Is there a consensus on the
There is no consensus on this editor because it is not open source but if you want to end your pain try WysiwygPro -- it is as close to perfect as an editor widget gets in terms of its core job, and the tools for adding images or files to your text areas are superb. We used this editor on client sites for years both with Joomla and our own CMS. Life was good. When we started using Drupal 1-2 years ago, we made a very determined effort to use TinyMCE for our clients instead because of its wide support in the Drupal community. And it works . . . sort of. With ICME you can even insert images. But recently somebody released a module to support WysiwygPro in Drupal. We are now back to purchasing WysiwygPro for each of our clients (at our expense) because the difference in user experience is worth ten times that price. Life is good again.
It's too bad there is no open source equivalent yet after all of these years, but alas there is not (yet) and I personally haven't seen anything on the horizon. Both TinyMCE and FCK et. al. have grown leaps and bounds in the past 5+ years (or however long they have been around) but just aren't there yet and may never be. It's like the difference between an iPhone and a Windows Mobile 6 device: the iPhone just feels "right" from the first time you hold it while WM6 feels unpolished and perhaps like it is on the verge of exploding even though you can tweak it to look and function almost like an iPhone. Almost. :-)
"human factors" is just the
"human factors" is just the old school way of talking about usability, lol. I was a UI designer for telephones for a while.
> image adding is a bit of a
> image adding is a bit of a mess in Drupal.
Yup. I completely agree.
There are too many different approaches, too many similar or not-quite-similar modules. It's horrendously confusing to newbies, who just want an out-of-the-box way of managing images.
It's good to see a consensus
It's good to see a consensus even though the consensus is that the basic Drupal usablity is rubbish on this count.
In the end I have ssettled for image and image-assist. This allows end-users to attach an image to a post and then I, as webmaster, can choose whether or not to insert it and where to insert it in their story.
The image module only allowed me to add a picture ABOVE or BELOW the main body of a node ( I think) Or maybe that was image-attach.
Gaw! Confusing.
As someone says in another thread, Drupal is supposed to be a CMS and the C stands for content. Pictures are content. This should be basic out-of-the-box stuff.
How many of you Drupal users out there do NOT use pictures?
check this
Comparison of Drupal 5 WYSIWYG Editors - http://drupal.org/node/208456
add images to nodes
Not sure if you solved this or not, but the answer is very very simple.
Download these two modules, together they do exactly what you need:
Image module - this creates image node types (for every image you submit a new node is also created)
Image Assist module - this makes it easy to insert a new or previously submitted image in a regular node type - it creates the img tags automatically, and you can select the alignment too (left, right, etc).
Get them from here: http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/67