Tuxkids

Links to my Drupal Galleries

Image Module Gallery - http://trinityriverinterchange.com/category/image-galleries/layouts 

Image Cache / Views - http://chrisatkins.com/gallery_page 

Image Cache /Views D6 - http://theatkinsfamily.com/frontpage 

Gallery2                 - http://chrisatkins.com/gallery2/main.php 

Image Gallery Views - http://trinityriverinterchange.com/twmr 

Highslide JS            - http://chrisatkins.com/ 

 

TinyMCE is a great WYSIWYG editor for Drupal, but there are a couple things that it doesn't do right out of the box. First, you have to enable the Firefox spell checking. This seems like an obvious feature, and I'm not sure why it is turned off by default.

This topic was covered in the Drupal forums. To enable spell checking in Firefox, navigate to modules/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/spellchecker/config.php and change the line $spellCheckerConfig['enabled'] = false; to true.

A second great feature that can be added to TinyMCE is integration with the Drupal module image assist. Specifically, this allows you to easily upload and add inline images through a button in TinyMCE.

If you don't have TinyMCE installed and running, here is a great tutorial on installing TinyMCE. In the tutorial, there is a section on adding image assist. These instructions are for Drupal 5, but are also valid for Drupal 6 except that the plugins folder for image assist has changed to modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ Since there are several plugins folders in the tinymce directory structure, this can be confusing. An excellent resource is the INSTALL.txt file in the image assist directory.

When the image assist is working, you will see a camera in the toolbar. As you enter content in the TinyMCE window, you can place the cursor at the point you want to place an image and click the camera. This will bring up a window where you can choose an image that has been loaded previously or upload a new one. When you upload the images make sure you de-select the check box to promote the images to the frontpage.

I added a few blocks to my tuxkids Drupal 6 site tonight to show different ways a blog might be spiced up a little. First, the block on the right called Twitter chrisindallas is an example of a piece of custom php code that can add functionality to Drupal.

First, I found the URL to my Twitter feed at the bottom of my Twitter profile page. I could have also subscribed to the feed with all my friends. Once I copied that, I entered it in the aggregator module that is part of Drupal core by going to Administer->Content management->Feed aggregator. There I created a new feed called Twitter chrisindallas and pasted the URL and set the Update interval to 15 minutes.

Next I created an empty block under Administer->Site building->Blocks Then, I borrowed a piece of php code from the Drupal website. Instructions on setting up the code are there. Make sure you set the input format to php and update your cron tables to run every 15 minutes. That way your tweets will be fresh.

I also found a del.icio.us widget that uses Javascript on the del.icio.us website. This very small piece of Javascript can be placed in a empty block just like the Twitter php code. The main difference is that the input format need to be changed to Full HTML. I didn't add a title to the block because widget supplies its own.
Next I added another twitter widget. This time it is a Flash badge that is a little more colorful that blue text on a white background. I got the code from Twitter. Place it in an empty block and you are ready to go.

Several more Twitter badges can be found on their download page.

I also added a tag cloud using the Tagadelic module for Drupal 6. This common widget is simply a list of all tags used with an larger fonts given to the most used tags. After decompressing it into sites/all/modules and enabling, a block is added with php code from the Drupal website.

The last badge I added is also Flash, but this one has some animation. The Flickr badge can be found at http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne This one required the input format be be set to php code.

There are a lot more things you can do to dress up your blog. A list of 50 is available in the Mashable article.

I am taking some time to set up this Drupal site to be more blog like. What does that mean? Well for me, there are several things that scream blog to me when I come across a web site. Obviously, there is the content itself, but many of the blogs I have enjoysed have blocks that tell the reader something about the blogger.

Here are some things I have seen on blogs I like:

• clean design with dark letters on white background
• links to the bloggers friends and influences
• feeds from Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, etc.
• lots of inline images
• free tagging and a tag cloud
• addition of javascript gadgets

This is a start. I plan on expanding on this list as I develop this idea.

So far, I have added my twitter feed to this blog. I also plan on adding some other feeds and dressing the site up a little while keeping a clean design.

The site xolotl.org an article on blogging in Drupal 5 that has some great suggestions. The site is a good example of a Drupal blog itself.

Some other sites that I have found, although not a complete list:

•  ImageSpace -- Nonprofits andWeb 2.0
• AylesburyLIFE
• @FIRST_LIGHT
• net squared
• seanreiser.com
• zivtech.com