Some Helpful Drupal Resources

The best resource for understanding how Drupal works is actually the handbooks at Drupal.org.

Learn By The Drop has some very interesting videos about setting up Drupal and some other basic info to get your site up and working quickly. I browsed their screencast about setting up FCKEditor and was very impressed.

There are also some very interesting screencasts at DrupalTherapy.com. In fact, I used the Date + Calendar screencast to setup my own event content type.

Lastly, a blog aggregator called PlanetDrupal is also fun to keep up with.

What are some of your favorite Drupal resources?

Picking a WYSIWYG Editor for Drupal

I've been doing a lot of research lately into setting up Drupal as a Content Management System. One of Drupal's shortcomings (by design) is the current production version doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor. The lack of a visual editor is not a big deal since there are several editors you can just plug-in (more or less) as a module.


The first editor I tried was TinyMCE by Moxicode. I originally got this editor setup in short time with help from Howard Rogers. It was easy to install and did most of what I wanted. However, as I got a little more sophisticated, I started using grids and images more and more. Most of the time my entries came out OK, but every now and then my theme was all messed up because of a misplaced HTML tag. Not a major hassle for me, but if I was going to open my website up to non-technical users, I couldn't risk them unintentionally screwing it up.

So I searched a little more and came up with FCKEditor. It's a little more difficult to install than TinyMCE as you have to go in and modify a PHP file, but the instructions are clear and simple. It also comes with everything you need out of the box and there is little extra configuration that you have to do. However, with that ease of use comes a lack of granularity. So it's a trade-off. Best of all, the grids and images work great with my chosen theme.

For now, I'm sticking with FCKEditor.