Authoring content for Drupal
I posted some questions on this here (http://drupal.org/node/42364), mostly mentioning blogger's "Blogger for Word" tool that is a simple program that makes publishing to your blogger blog a snap. I don't think the code is open and available. Of course a great solution would be to take that code and simply point it to your drupal blog, but some other options using macros are mentioned in the thread that I haven't got working yet.
Though I didn't really write much, I was surprised at how little discussion there was, and appears to be, about offline content creation tools. In the past I thought the lack of simple integrated image support was where Drupal was behind the curve. That is improved much now, even if not perfect for everyone. Now I'd say a piece of the puzzle that could really keep Drupal ahead of the rest is integration with commonly used word processing tools like Open Office Word and Word. As this article notes , notes Word Processing is far behind our Web 2.0 world.
I've tried W.Bloggar and some other tools and have found them to be helpful, but still a far cry from the familiar environments of Word and Writer. I'm sure most of the developers who hangout on Drupal scoff at anything nice being said about Word, but the reality is that casual Word users are finding a need to publish to the web. Developing some tools or documenting existing solutions that make creating content for Drupal (ideally more content types than just blogs) as easy as using Blogger for Word would be a great boon to the Drupal world.
I'm curious what others think on this topic and would love to hear an good solutions you've found. I've been playing with the Beta version of Office Word 12 and notice they have a "developers" tab with several xml and stylesheet functions that could help in web publishing. Any thoughts?
I use ecto
Works great for most blogging purposes, and does a lot more than Bill's Singular Vision has room for, such as incorporating Flickr images.
http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/
Laura
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pingVision • rare pattern • scattered sunshine
Yes but...
Ecto is great and I've used it. But #1 it isn't free. Of course, Word isn't either, but most people have it on their computers and open office is free. But #2, it doesn't really move Drupal towards wider use by the non-techie world. Maybe that isn't the best way to put it, but the reaility is the average person uses word, the average business uses word. To make Drupal more generally useful and business friendly there needs to be an effort to incorporate existing widely used software, rather than creating something new using a different word processor.
I guess I'm thinking something more like Macromedia's Contribute or even better and simpler, blogger for word like I mentioned before.
Perhaps, I'm the only one curious about this stuff, but more likely the level of developer that codes stuff for Drupal is at a level of techpertise that the wouldn't even consider integrating Word. Of course, the rest of the world does use Word and it would be a much bigger selling point for Drupal, especially to business users, to say, "Yep, you just create your document in Word, like you are already doing now, and click a button and it is on your site."
I can't help you
I'm not technically sophisticated enough to understand Word. That damn paperclip vexes me.
Laura
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pingVision • rare pattern • scattered sunshine
Jasonwhat,You are on to a
Jasonwhat,
You are on to a very good point. Things need to be made very easy for the less sophisticated user if Drupal is really to have a wider appeal. I dont even know if it would be technically feasible to use Word as a posting mechanism, but if it were, it would be a huge leg up in allowing more people to interact with Drupal and community web sites.
Davec
Forest Lake Online
Word uses non ASCII standard
Word uses non ASCII standard letter sets as it's default. It does not do well when copy and pasting to a web site. It by it's very nature is NOT a good tool to use when posting data. The effect is odd, most usually occuring with quotes and other characters.
There is much historical venting on the web and such for this decisian in the past years. Feel free to look them up. There are other blogging client tools available, some free, some not (but cheaper then word). If I recall, Office 12 is also using their own XML schema to increase the difficulty of integration with non MS products.
Using Word to post blog content is like using a sledgehammer to drive finish nails. Yes, it is posible, but it is certainly not the right tool for the job. There is also that new Flock blogging tool you can take for a test run. Rather than try and make a sledge hammer fit, I think you would ultimatly have more enjoying finding the right tool for the job.
Which ever path you go, I would certainly appreciate it if you would add docs to the handbook as you go.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Like cut and paste?
Have you tried cut and pasting from Word into a WYSIWYG editor? Because that "just works".
And really, it's not about the tools as much as it is about process.
If this is someone that has Word on their desktop (and most people, if they are home users, actually have stolen/pirated copies...so it's definitely not free), how do you get them used to posting online? What do they have a website for? Are they a small business? Is writing a blog post the same as putting together a Word document? Should it be? Are they in a large business, collaborating with a group? Do they have to send the completed document to someone else, or is it for consumption inside the company?
If someone really wanted to do it, it would likely be fairly easy to create a blogging plugin from Word that can post to Drupal, especially with the Blogger plugin as an example.
many uses
My experience is mostly with small nonprofit organizations and political groups. These groups need simple websites that they can update with the information they often produce in Word. Sometimes it is a newsletter or other update. In most situations, one person is creating the content and several make edits and give approval before posting to a website. Also, often the director or candidate will have a personal blog. A blogger from Word tool would be useful for blogging and really any site content.
Don't get me wrong. I like many of the tools out there and personally just use gmail to create my blog posts with the mailhandler module. You get good html and nice spellchecking. To my suprise, creating content this way and even editing online is very intimidating to many people. They really just want to use what they are used to, Word, even though other options are better and easier. While there are many good arguments against this, I don't think they outweigh the reality that it would be huge for Drupal to add, "Manage and Publish Your Content From Word" to the list of features. Word is the standard documents in the business world and most people's personal world, as much as that annoys most of us.
My guess is that many people would want this feature and there are probably some businesses out there that chose something else over drupal rather than developing the needed plugin. I don't think it is a lack of general desire, but a lack of desire by the people who do the developing and those that can afford to hire developers.
MS Word + "Web Folders" (WEBDAV) would work?
I Dunno if there's a WEBDAV module that's up to the task yet, but this approach would seem to bridge part of the gap.
There are a whole heap of caveats to doing it this way, the big one being that there are a bunch of Office Users out there who can hardly handle the concept of "Save As", let alone file naming conventions, and have an unruly number of "New Document 27.doc" files in their "My Documents" folder. They will never be able to just "Click a button and it's on the site"
There are other things that just wouldn't work from Word (or any arbitrary editor) like taxonomy or custom node additions. Posting an article (Drupal) is actually a different action than Creating a document (Word). Unless the user can realize that and modify their workflow to combine the two actions, work in this direction would be hard.
... another thought - a "Send To" plugin could probably be made - although that would have to launch the Drupal site in a web browser to complete the action, and really be no advantage over the obvious Cut & Paste approach.
You want a handbook page explaining how to use Word & Drupal together?
CTRL+A CTRL+C ALT+TAB [click] CTRL+V
(... and you've also just learnt a transferrable skill)
.dan.
http://www.coders.co.nz/
not as hard as you think
The blogger for word module already does it and you just need your username and password. There has to be a way to point that to a Drupal sites xmlrpc.php. There is also an amazing module that publishes whole folders of photos to drupal using windows "publish to website feature" and even lets you place it in a category from the site. There could be a way to leverage that. Finally, I've actually done this using methods listed here, http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/stories/2002/05/0014.html the only problem being it bosted all the content as a title. Both this macro and blogger for wrod use simple html which is nice.
I'm not surprised that there is a general, "It's not that hard to cut-and-paste" attitude about this. I agree. However, I still think usability features like this are the difference between Drupal being for those in the Tech-know, and "Drupal" being a household term, like "blogger" and "blogspot."
Import approaches
Dear Mr.
- The wiki Uniwaka imports open office texts (with the included objets, image, math...). Thus there is a special export filter from open office.
http://uniwakka.sourceforge.net/HomePage
- The cms lodel performs even better and is used to provide online scientific journal. Uses servoo to directly import open office documents.
http://www.lodel.org/
- The Wikiwyg.net is wonderfull because it displays very well the section edited. I had like to have such kind of editor with Drupal. The perfect way.
Cordially
C&P vs import
FabriceV, I think you're on the right track.
My angle is making it as easy as possible for users to contribute new content, and the best tool for that job is whatever they feel most comfortable with, whether it's a quill pen or an M$ paper clip.
TinyMCE includes a 'paste from Word' (bundled) plugin that appears to do a very good job of filtering out the tag crap generated by M$. I've not experienced any problems with character encoding yet... but it too relies on C&P.
C&P doesn't cover all needs: the one WYSIWYG gadget I've not seen yet is something that will automatically upload (as attachments?) things like inline images when you simply C&P an article.
I appreciate that it's pretty tricky for those like me who have trouble thinking outside the html file structure, aswell as browser protocols discouraging websites from uploading desktop files 'behind the scenes'.
However, would it be possible to upload (in one click), say, a whole pdf or doc and have a drupal module unravel (rip) it, putting the text in the DB field and images in the filestore, etc and then show you an editable preview ? ... IMHO this 'import' module would be a tremendous UI victory.
Hmm the more I think about it the more I suspect someone's already done it ... apologies if I've missed something obvious - please let me know :)