Drupal Tuesdays: First Edition

James Robertson

In Which We Introduce Drupal and Address the Lack of a WYSIWYG Editor.

Because Drupal kind of rhymes with Tuesday (Drupal Duesdays?), I thought I would use this day of the week to fulfill my promise relayed in my first post of the semester.

While I was going to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start, I am told), I have been called to action by my colleague and friend Russ Choma. I shall address his concerns presently, after a little bit of context.

As Russ mentioned, Drupal is the open-source content management system we use to run this site. It's a very modular system, where you have a core set of code to which you can add bits and pieces of functionality (a themed set of templates, for example) to make it work the way you want.

Several upsides to Drupal revolve around the fact that it is an open-source platform. It allows people with little to no coding experience to create very powerful Web sites by harnessing all those computer scientists out there with a love for programming and a lot of time on their hands to do the programming for them. And because these computer scientists like to "stick it to the man," or simply just believe the Web should retain the spirit of one of its original reasons for being (communication for scholarly research), they provide their services for free. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would probably make you pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for such a chunk of useful code as Drupal. The computer scientists also like to form communities that create larger projects than one person can handle, or simply provide free support to the people that don't have as much experience in the programming world.

Drupal's community is very large. In fact, in March Drupal is holding a conference here in the District that was closed at 1,300 attendees (sadly, I didn't get my ticket), with more people from all over the world clamoring for tickets on Drupal's message boards. This provides us here at the American Observer with lots of add-ins (called modules), templates, and support if things go wrong.

The downside to Drupal is also that it is open-source. The same things that could be touted as pros also come as cons: the community has no obligation to help you in a reasonable time frame (let alone help you at all), and if there's not a module or theme out there that fits your needs you're out of luck, unless you can find a computer scientist friend with a warm heart and lots of time on their hands.

This is the problem I ran into last semester with the WYSIWYG editor, which Russ has added to his wish list for our site. At the risk of being patronizing, WYSIWYG is a computer nerd term that stands for What You See Is What You Get, pronounced "whiz-ee-wig" (and yes, Russ, that was a pain to code). There is a WYSIWYG module, called TinyMCE, for Drupal, but due to my relative inexperience I could not get it to work. In addition, the argument against having such an editor last semester was that we were supposed to be learning how to code HTML and CSS in the class. Therefore, the project became unimportant, and I focused on other tasks, like adding audio and video functionality to the site.*

However, Russ is right. Those coding skills are no longer the emphasis of the class we are taking right now, and a WYSIWYG editor would allow us to focus more on editing and packaging, which will fit into our new magazine format this semester. TinyMCE could also be plugged into the comments, allowing our adoring public to link easily and make their points in bold text if they so choose. No more ALL CAPS, at least until someone really gets angry at us.

Which brings me to an announcement of sorts: For the February 18 issue, expect to see a new (and hopefully improved) look for the Observer, as well as some new features we're excited about (I'll save those for another time, or let my colleagues address them).

*Audio and video chosen for their use of the built-in media player--thanks Kelly and Anna!

Cross posted to JamesGRobertson.com.