I'm pullin' my hair out here! I did search. I'm hoping something new has come out since most of those threads died. I'm frusterated with people who throw out a module name without trying to understand what I'm doing. It takes me 3 hours to install it and configure it to find out it doesn't work for what I need it to (also since most modules don't have screenshots).
Anyway, I'm trying to start a website for people to post blogs. That's the only content they'll be posting. They'll need to be able to post photos that mix in with the text. Several photos per blog. Now I can figure out how to post the img code or [img] code or whatever, but they can't. I'm shocked that there is (or hopefully was) no easy way to do this. Blogger.com has an perfect way of accomplishing this. (Seen HERE).
I just want them to be able to:
Type a bit
Upload AND Insert picture
Type some more
Upload AND Insert picture
Type a closing
Post blog
Does ANYBODY have an easy to use solution? Anybody have screenshots or sample pages? I'd REALLY appreciate any help.
Thanks,
Billy
Comments
I don't believe that exactly
I don't believe that exactly what you're looking for exists.
The closest is to allow attachments (under content -> configure -> content types) which uploads the file, but doesn't just display it. The user could then use something like the image assist module to browse all the uploaded photos and add the appropriate code to the blog automatically. But they would have to save the blog after adding the attachments so that the photos get uploaded. Then they would have to edit the blog to actually display the photos.
It might make more sense to allow the users to have an image gallery. The only module you need for this is image. They could go to their image gallery to upload all their photos. Then when they are editing their blog, they can browse all their uploaded photos via the image assist module, and automatically add the image code or filter tags.
The advantages to this, over the system you described, is that if they post the same picture more than once, they won't have to upload it again. They can also post thumbnails in the blog, that link to the actual image node. If you are allowing comments, other users would be able to add comments to the blog and the images separately.
Sorry, that's all I can think of to suggest!
Method 3
Method 3 is to use upload.module to upload images and inline module to put them into nose body, by using a positional tag.
Very simple and effective; furthermore, uploads are relative t oa node, so they can be protected as the node itself.
Matteo
Good point about protection
Yeah - that wasn't specified by the poster. I'm assuming 'Upload' only uses relative paths if you set the 'Download Method' in Admin->Settings to 'Private'. Is that what you're using?
Also, I assume that Martsmarty would work with the files from Upload in the same way as Inline.
David
http://www.jiffle.net/
Exactly that !!
Exactly, if download is private, you can protect also images or files attached to a node...
Matteo
I appreciate your suggestion
I appreciate your suggestion and the time you took to post it, but I really don't want them to have to search though pictures and find the one they need. They won't ever need to post a picture in two different blogs (because they're creating a timeline), and I don't want to give them the impression that my site is for free image storage.
Thanks,
Billy
Method 1 - HTMLArea
One method is to use the image support in the HTMLArea WYSIWYG editor contributed module. The required steps are (this is from memory, so excuse any slips):
The 'Add Image' button brings up a nice little dialog box that allows you to upload your image to whichever taxonomy you want and then insert it into the post.
Hope this helps
David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/
"The 'Add Image' button
"The 'Add Image' button brings up a nice little dialog box that allows you to upload your image to whichever taxonomy you want and then insert it into the post."
I tried this combination and when I clicked on the image button it didn't give me the option to upload... just to enter the image URL. Maybe I didn't have it installed correctly?
Thanks,
Billy
My Mistake
Yes, you're right. The bit that I got wrong was that you need to go into the 'plugins' tab of Admin->Settings->HTMLArea and check the 'UploadImage' box.
Then the dialog should operate as I described.
I'll edit the orginal post to correct it(can't edit posts that have been replied to!).David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/
I need 5 steep!!!
First
Thanks for your post.
After many hours for test and some changes... I try this. And this is OK:
5. Navegate to Admin->input formats->configure(Fitered HTML / configure) -> Add image tag [img]
in field "Allowed HTML tags"
NOTE: I try post valid sintaxis for imaga tag... but this site not permit.
Greentings.
Rodrigo Barahona
CONLINUX.NET
Not the solution, but...
I from time to time add pictures to my blog entries. I do this with the file-attach module and some basic html in the following steps.
* Type in my blog
* Select the picture with the browse button
* Attach it with the 'preview' button
* Uncheck the 'list' option for the attachment and copy the location of the image.
* Make a simple line like this:
* Then hit preview again.
image_assist probably is easier but this isn't all that complicated either.
Andri
Administrator by day... Hobby programmer by night...
This is not XHTML, it should
This is not XHTML. I tried to post an example but unfortunately Drupal.org cannot handle it. The idea is to use a final / to close the img tag, and use CSS style for alignment and border.
--
NSK, Founder of the Wikinerds Community. See my Drupal site, the Wikinerds Portal.
Agreed
Also it would need an 'alt' attribute for Disabled Accessibility.
BTW - I think the reason that you were usable to post your example is that Drupal objects to the word 'style' inside a <pre> block. I used 'styl3' as a substitute!
--------------------
David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/
Yes, this is plenty simple
Yes, this is plenty simple enough for me, but not for my visitors. I modified upload.module and got it to spit out [img] tags around the URL of an uploaded file (where it currently only shows the URL), but of course that won't work. I get errors when I try to make it spit out the actual HTML you posted (so they could copy and paste and not need to know the code themselves).
Thanks,
Billy
Input Filters
In order to make the [img] syntax work, you need to enable the correct Input Filter for your users.
Alternatively, to get it to spit out HTML, you'll need to escape reserved characters in HTML, such as:
Good references for character entities are available at Blooberry and W3Schools.
David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/
Wow! that is extremely
Wow! that is extremely helpful!
Thanks man,
Billy
Method 2 - Image Filter
If you don't want to use WYSIWYG in your blog posts, then the 'Image-Filter' module might help. Unfortunately you will have to upload the images separately (beforehand), but this will allow you to reference them in your post. The markup/markdown for the image takes the following form:
(Note that the last attribute is actually 'style' not 'styl3' - the correct word messed up the page format!)
Also, the 'Inline' module allows embedding of uploaded files (as opposed to images, so your images won't have the option of appearing in the Image Galleries). This can include images, although you cannot control the individual sizes of the images - they'll size to the image dimensions, although you can apparently set global limits of the maximum width and height that the images will be sized to.
David
http://www.jiffle.net/
Method 3 - Markdown
This is this one I use myself (because I happen to prefer rich Markup to WYSIWYG or HTML). Install the 'Image' and 'Marksmarty' modules. Arrange your image gallery taxonomony so that you have two sets of images - the ones that appear in Image Galleries and the ones that do not.
Upload your images and note their node numbers. I use a browser with tabs (Firefox), so that I can have one tab with the main article and the other tabs uploading the images at the same time. Don't worry - You can submit images while you are authoring your article.
In your article, you embed your images (in this case our image has uploaded as node 24) with the following code:
The 'Alt Text' is the required alternative text to allow reading of the page by the blind and Google crawlers, so I would strongly advise using it! The 'image/view/24' picks up the raw image for node 24 from the image gallery module.
More details of the Markdown syntax are available here.
David
http://www.jiffle.net/
Easy Image Posting By USERS
I think most of the commenters here have missed Billy's point: He wants it to be easy for his non-technical blog posters to include one or more pictures in their individual blog articles.
He does not want to collect and upload images for them (what an awful workload!). And they will not be programmers comfortable with doing these tasks. At best, they will just be people who know how to write. And may want to share a couple of pictures.
Requiring people to upload pictures to a seperate gallery (one outside the individual blog) is just silly and totally misses the mark. It would be like requiring people to read a newspaper with nothing but text on the first several pages, and requiring users to turn to back pages to see the pictures related to each article. The paper would quickly go out of business due to its lack of user friendliness. To be successful we need to think less like programmers and more like document editors.
The feature Billy is asking for is one I also want for my users. They too will be people who simply want to write and post. They won't even want to be interrupted in the act of posting by a demand to figure out how the proposed blog submission should be classified in a taxonomy (another workload disincentive). It sounds like we need a new form of blog module.
Cheerily Yours,
Tim O'Laguna
YES! THANK YOU!!
YES! THANK YOU!!
I don't see why it's so difficult. I have now modified upload.module to print the full img tag where the url used to be and I have added instructions above that on how to copy and paste, but this is just a workaround for now.
Thanks,
Billy
img_assist has the ability
img_assist has the ability to upload an image without leaving the node input form. Another way is to use upload and inline module but this requires the user to upload to the node, then preview and check a box to display inline.
If I knew an easier way, I would answer it. I suspect if anyone knew an easier way they would answer it. Answer, no one who codes has spent the time really get into this except the author of the img_assist module in combination with TinyMCE.
-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Did you get method 1 working?
There's a reason why it was method 1 - cos that was the one that most closely fitted the question - IMHO.
I only gave the others as alternatives - and also for lurkers who might have a similar question, but needed slightly different answers.
David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/
Just use XHTML and CSS,
Just use XHTML and CSS, that's what I do on my site. Of course, it sucks, but it's the only solution which gives me total control over how the images appear.
--
NSK, Founder of the Wikinerds Community. See my Drupal site, the Wikinerds Portal.
Care to elaborate?
Care to elaborate? :)
Thanks,
Billy
Elaboration
It’s simple really…
Full HTML
input format.<img>
tag in your blog post that points at the location of the image you just uploaded.Your mileage may vary.
- John (JohnAlbin)
But that's not how it works
But that's not how it works in Microsoft Word so I'm lost ;)
-zach
------------------------
harkey design
: z
New Solution
I can relate to your need for an EASY solution. My users sometimes have difficulty logging in and changing their password, so I definitely can't expect them to upload or attach images and then type (or copy and paste) a filter tag into their post.
For my sites, I'm about 99% done with a complete rewrite of img_assist. Like the original img_assist, it's a popup window. It works best with TinyMCE (you won't have to see any filter tags), but it can also be launched from an optional text link below the textarea. Anyway, take a look at some screenshots: http://www.benjaminshell.com/demo/img_assist.htm
Although it's 99% done, I'm just not sure what to do with it. There are already so many different ways to do inline image related things with Drupal that I hate to start yet another new module!
This looks very interesting.
This looks very interesting. You can either try contributing this as a patch to image_assist module (no CVS access is needed for patches) or providing a link where people interested can download it (if the rewrite is significant).
your new solution...
do you need any testers for this? i am very interested in seeing it. running current cvs install.
as much as there may not need to be another image module, i agree the wysywig approach should be totally easy for the user. the solutions thus far are not user-friendly, or are buggy (like image assist showing up for comments and trackback fields. ugh)
so yeah - when will this be ready for public consumption?
Easy Image Posting By USERS
Wow! Great-looking solution. Please let us know when it becomes available.
Cheerily Yours,
Tim O'Laguna
Available now
I've made it available for download from my site. I also started a new forum topic about it: http://drupal.org/node/32506
The original maintainer of
The original maintainer of img_assist is fairly active, perhaps if you could hit his contact form and see if anything you've done could be used in the img_assist module.
-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
I only tried Mambo for a
I only tried Mambo for a short while before ditching it for Drupal, but it was incredibly easy to add an image *and* align it at the same time- you could just set this in the input form as left or right etc and that was it.
Make it simple, then make it better
The problem with all the existing solutions is in their flexibility... There's literally too many uses for img_assist and the like, and no simple way to insert an image into a blog post.
Ideally, something "blogger simple" would be good, but as an absolute baseline, I'd like to see the following option in core/attachment/upload/wherever:
"Display image file types INLINE"
Of course, this would just plop all the images in at the end of a blog post, without nice formatty-ness, but for the most basic users, this is how their post is going to look anyway (though, again, with blogger you might have the image on top, say).
I'm not one to knock Drupal at all - I think it's the best of many solutions out there for a whole lot of things (including my company's intranet)... But, for any story, but especially blogs, having this "dumb" level of functionality is aboslutely KEY to driving Drupal adoption for beginners, who can then take baby steps into learning hand-coding HTML, WYSIWYG editors, etc... But, it's a pain in the ass if your cat had babies and you can't even get a little picture up to say "kittens for sale" until they're six weeks old. ;)
I don't even rate myself a beginner - but I'm definitely too busy to mess around with TinyMCE on a REGULAR basis for my posts. Something simpler is needed, and if it can be simple now and featureful later, that would be best!
image_tab.module
Maybe you can take a look at the image_tab.module which is under development?
It sounds like this is (going to be) what you are searching for.
http://drupal.org/node/35635
inline module
http://drupal.org/project/inline
-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Final Attempt
I've looked at this question further, and assuming you do want to give your users rich WYSIWYG editing capability then you can do the following:
If you don't want the images to appear as Drupal nodes, then install the HTMLArea module, go to 'plugins' in 'Admin->Settings->HTMLArea' and check the 'ImageManager' plugin. You may want to customise it to use Drupal's file upload area, installation details here. Also Usage Instructions and Screenshot.
If you do want the images to integrate with Drupal Galleries then install the HTMLArea and Image modules, go to 'plugins' in 'Admin->Settings->HTMLArea' and check the 'UploadImage' plugin. Usage Instructions and Screenshot.
If you don't want rich-text editing then the 'Img_Assist' module may well suit you perfectly (as others have suggested) - it just doesn't work with TinyMCE or HTMLArea.
BTW, those that find TinyMCE too complicated to set up might want to try HTMLArea. It is much easier to configure and, in my opinion, more powerful. The only advantage that TinyMCE has it that it allows profiles to display different toolbar layouts to different user types.
edit: As my web host has trashed its server, I have changed the URLs to make it easier to recreate them, if I have to.
edit#2: My web host has got the server back on-line, with the posts restored.
Hope this helps
david
David Hamilton
http://www.jiffle.net/
Excellent Tips!
Thank you so much for showing us how.
Cheerily Yours,
Tim O'Laguna
Former Commodore 64 Junior Wizard
Thank you for such a comprehensively helpful post
Like others in this thread I'm looking for this Holy Grail of usability features for my community, who are largely not comfortable with html.
It would be nice to simplify things even more for them by setting predetermined size and alignment, but this is much better than the alternatives even as is.
Phoebe
--
Visit The Town
meet ~ discuss ~ connect
www.the-town.org
Sorry for double post
Whoops. Somehow got it twice. Sorry!
img_assist in action. Detailed instructions and screenshots
I created a tutorial on how to install the img_assist. There are a lot of screenshots and you can try it live on my Drupal site. I hope it will help somebody not to break his head trying to solve the inline image uploading issue.
Please, comment on the tutorial page or here if you think something could be added or clarified more.
P.S.
Similar well-screenshotted tutorial on TinyMCE + image uploading is planned
"Similar well-screenshotted
"Similar well-screenshotted tutorial on TinyMCE + image uploading is planned"
any progress on this yet? I'm beating my head on the desk over getting image uploading to work with tinymce. any help would be greatly appreciated.
www.robcomm.net
Sorry, jivyb, I've lost the
Sorry, jivyb, I've lost the passion for that tutorial blog. In fact I wrote to that blog while I was building a Drupal site on programming. So I decided to help everybody by carefully recording my own actions. But now the site is up and running, I decided to live without the WYSIWYG editor and image uploading and the tutorial blog is empty. It is still visited quite a lot from Drupal.org and hopefully is useful for some people, that's why I am not closing the blog down.
Six more months ... what's the latest?
Has this progressed?
I need the same thing. Non-tech users need to type, upload an image, type some more, etc. I installed Drupal 5.1 a week ago because I scanned the forums beforehand and there seemed to be several solutions. Now, that I installed Drupal a week ago, I've been trying to find a solution but:
tinyMCE seems to be in limbo and lots of install problems on 5.1
If I go with Moxie what else do I need?
HTMLarea is discontinued
I can't figure out exactly what Xinha does.
I can't seem to find a clear way to do exactly what Billy is asking, (except for pages and stories too, not just blogs.) Has anyone seen a tutorial or anything on this?
I guess I can just tell them to use NVU or some sort HTML editor, and upload the pix with the HTML editor's built-in FTP and copy the HTML into the Drupal window. But that's just going to blow the users' minds as too hard. I'd have to think this is way up on the list for Drupal and already solved, so maybe I just need to ask.
thanks,
Quint
...
Considering that Drupal and modules have evolved significantly in over a year just use img_assist. It's the easiest, least complicated solution. Perhaps start a brand new thread rather then revive one this old?
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide