Revitalization

So I started this Drupal site many moons ago, and in the process I made the mistake of not tagging my posts with some sort of filtering system.  Now that there are well over 300 posts it's gotten a bit difficult to navigate.

On top of that with the periodic changes of how the site handles images due to broken modules or developers with a severe attitude problem/superiority complex, resulting in my switching from Wysiwyg + Img_Asisst to OpenWysiwyg, then to FCKEditor + ImageBrowser and finally CKEditor + IMCE, there's a bit of a mess to clean up.  I'm pretty content with my current CKEditor + IMCE setup - it's not user intuitive to add photos to posts but it's not impossible either.

To explain in a bit more detail, Wysiwyg, FCKEditor and CKEditor are all modules designed to support Java based WYSIWYG editors in Drupal (what you see is what you get).  It makes creating new posts on a web site much easier, sort of like the difference between typing a specially formatted letter out in Microsoft Word, compared to trying to do the same thing with Notepad.  Due to licensing restrictions the editors themselves are not included in the module and need to be downloaded and installed separately - which is not recommended for the Drupal novice.  This kind of editor is built into Wordpress, which is one of the reasons why Wordpress is excellent for someone who does not want to spend a large amount of time messing with nuts and bolts.

But I digress.

The Image Assist, ImageBrowser and IMCE modules are image helper modules, each designed to be used in conjunction with your preferred WYSIWYG editor.  Getting them to play nice with your preferred WYSIWYG editor can be a bit of a challenge as well.  They come in handy, however, if you want to add images to your post without having to FTP them to your server, figure out where they are located and add the hypertext code to the post manually to get them to appear the way you want - this entire process is streamlined with just a few clicks using one of these modules.

My original reason for dropping the modules Wysiwyg and Image Assist was because the developer of both projects decided he would mark any versions that were no longer being actively developed as a severe security problem.  His reason for doing this was to ensure people would use the latest versions of the project to assist him in finding and correcting bugs.  I have a two-fold problem with this - first, it took a rather long time to get Wysiwyg and Image Assist working properly, and an upgrade could break them, requiring additional hours of work to get them functional again.  Second, I don't like a software developer forcing me to use a specific version of their software by sending security warnings to my website that are not, in fact, security warnings.

My third issue was with the Image Assist module, which was supposedly designed to make it easy to transition a site to a new location, lost all of its connections to images after I relocated the folder on the FatedtoEnd server during the upgrade to Drupal 6.0, and at the time my skills in MySQL were not up to the task of repairing the damage.  What is most annoying is that Image Assist was used heavily on other sites hosted here, and disabling the module also breaks those images, leaving non-standard tags in the post that make it difficult to track down the images they are supposed to display.  We've had broken image links ever since the upgrade - and I'm only now going through the site and fixing them because there are even MORE broken image links after I stopped using ImageBrowser.  Some images just can't be found, or the post was created so long ago I can't remember what picture I used.  I'm simply stripping the image tag out of these posts.

I briefly tried OpenWYSIWYG but I did not like the interface necessary to upload and add images to the page.  After just a few days of trying it, I removed it and installed FCKEditor and ImageBrowser.  It is worth noting, however, that the images loaded into posts created by OpenWYSIWYG were not affected by its removal.

ImageBrowser shares the same guilt as Image Assist in that it uses a non-standard method of displaying images on posts.  I know this because if there was standard html being used none of the images would have been affected by the removal of it.  It was nice in that it allowed a visible preview of a certain number of images on the site, and does not show every individual file, which can be a bit of a pain to wade through.  But the non-standard thing is a problem to me.

The problem is not all Drupal modules receive continuous development - the popular ones will typically attract new developers of the old ones get burned out, but sometimes modules are discontinued in favor of newer ones that do the same thing, but better.

Therefore, I was looking at the potential problem down the road of needing to either a) find a new method of displaying this content or b) the faint possibility of needing to port this content to another CMS system such as Joomla, in which case I would be looking at all of this work all over again.  This is why I went with IMCE, which seems to be popular enough that there will probably always be a developer, and because it uses standard html to insert images, which I prefer.

CKEditor is just the latest version of FCKEditor, and has a (in my opinion) nicer interface than older versions.  I've also finally been able to use the site's CSS code within the CKEditor, which means as I type what I see is really what I will get when I am finished, with maybe just some line reformatting.

Last but not least, I managed to get Lightbox2 working again, which is the nice animation popup you get when clicking on an image to see a larger version.  The method used to do this is to assign a "lightbox" class to each image I want this function to work on.  I prefer this to the old way of making Lightbox open up any image you click on, some images I either want people to view the old fashioned way by going straight to the image in the browser away from the rest of the page, and some images I don't want to pop up with a larger view.  All in all it works out well.

To assist the navigation of the site I've started using categories.  There is a list on the left side - currently clicking "Categories" does not help but clicking the + to the left of it will reveal the entire list, and it is then possible to chop through sections of the site.  I would like to make navigation a little easier than that, but most likely that will require some additional work.  I've still got over 100 posts to work through - only half of Fated to End has been categorized so far.

What's next?  Hopefully some creative writing will soon be added to that column on the left as well.