Alternative ways to enter content

Drupal's built-in form-based content editing approach is fine for many applications, but if you have a lot of text to create, or you wish to convert existing content, or if you are using a specialized content type such as a blog, it may be more convenient to use other approaches to enter content into your Drupal-based site.

Preparing your content offline suggests some ways to use familiar software on your computer to create or edit content before submitting it to Drupal.

Depending on what's available on your site, you might even be able to enter new articles without ever logging on to the site.

Drupal includes functionality for "blogging"--creating "blogs" or web-based journals with the BlogAPI module. If this functionality is enabled on your site, you may be able to input and edit content using one of a number of desktop "blog" software packages. These allow you to simply type in content, hit a "post" button, and have your content automatically loaded onto your site.

In fact, blogging software can be used for more than blogs--it can allow you to post content easily and quickly to almost any part of a website. Some examples of software you can use are:

Examples of applications that work with Drupal from the desktop include the following:

• Ecto - Mac
• MarsEdit - Mac
• MS Word 2007 - Windows

In addition to desktop blogging tools, other services like Flickr's "post to blog", Firefox plugin Scribefire and Google Docs should work with your Drupal site.

Before trying out one of the blogging programs, you might want to check with your site's maintainer to make sure it accepts blog posts. The key question to ask is: "Is the BlogAPI enabled?" If the answer is yes, you're ready to roll. If not, you could request that it be enabled to allow you quick updates.