When I was working on the California Watch site, we needed an easy way to allow non-technical folks to add photos to the bodies of articles. There was a fair bit of effort put into setting up alternate solutions prior to settling on using quicksketch's fabulous Insert module.

A few housekeeping items.

• You need cck 2.5
• You need to have WYSIWYG setup
• It helps to have FileField
• and ImageField
• and ImageCache
• and of course the Insert Module itself

Unpack the module in your sites/all/modules directory (I like creating a contrib directory inside the modules directory so I can separate out various kinds of non-core modules.) Enable the module at admin/build/modules

I added a new field to my page content type by going here: admin/content/node-type/page/fields and added a field image_uploads

I am not a huge fan of Microsoft even though I do make use of the company’s products regularly.  I have XP running on my Macbook Pro for browser testing.  I regularly make use of the Office suite.  I also have a few Microsoft games that I play on a regular basis.  The long and short is, I am a fan of open-source.

Yesterday was a strange day.  My brother Alec asked about online and offline HTML editors for Drupal and through the conversation it came out that he uses Live Writer for his personal blog.  Then later, at work, I was talking with a client who has a CMS that is really repository for Word docs.  There is the desire to move the content from these Word documents into Drupal without losing formatting.

FCKeditor was one option that came to mind.  It will allow you to cut and paste from Word.  This works fairly well.  It retains much of the formatting, but perhaps doesn’t quite echo the desktop experience that was desired.

A couple of nights ago I upgraded from Drupal 6.4 to 6.5. The next post I created threw an error--something like:

The selected file /tmp/filexxxx could not be uploaded, because the destination files/xmlsitemap/sitemap.xml.gz is not properly configured.
Unable to load site map. Make sure that there is an xmlsitemap directory in your files directory and that it is writable by Drupal.

If you allow any kind of user generated content on your Drupal site including comments, you will invariably start to see users crop up with user names like: "gyigrrgq", "porn", and "buy viagra". At best, the users sit in the user's table and do nothing. At worst, the users probe and then blast your Drupal instance with more spam than you can shake a stick at. Often the technique will be to leave comments on old content in the hopes that site managers won't notice it but it will generate some clickthroughs to whatever site the spammer is targeting.

What I like to do is set up a block of recent comments. Sometimes it is public and sometimes it is private to a single role depending the on the site-owner's needs. This is a very simple thing to do and will allow you to see new spam comments at a single glance. If you check your site every few days, you'll catch any spammy ugliness.

Over the last three or four days, I have had several people ask me about upgrading Drupal to the most recent versions of the software. At this point version 4 is up to 4.7.10 and version 5 is up to 5.5

Upgrading a Drupal site is pretty easy. It is always a good idea to grab a backup of your database and your Drupal files before starting the process. Upgrading from 4.x to 5.x is a little tougher than 5.x to a higher version of 5.x. This tutorial will focus on upgrading from a lower version of 5 to a higher version of 5. The most current version of Drupal is 5.5.