Get Rich With Drupal

So far I've been using the built in textfields to write my stories. Some of them have lists and images, so I have to add in Html codes, which is ok, but not really very convenient for writing long texts. Today I will show you how to add a custom module to Drupal which will make your life easier when writing a lot of content. Instead of the text entry to look like this

I want it to look like this

I also want an easy way to add images to my stories. After some research on the Drupal website I found that I need to install the following two modules:

• FCKEditor
• IMCE

I will show how to download and install the first module and leave the other as an exercise for you. First we'll download the module by selecting from the list of available releases.

I don't like living on the bleeding edge with my production sites, so I'll choose release 6.x-1.4 which is marked as recommended for the Drupal version I've installed. Clicking on the download link lets me save the module to my harddrive. I then unpack the archive using WinRAR which knows how to unpack unix style archives on my Windows PC. Then I upload the files to my webserver using WinSCP to the ~/www/getrichwithdrupal/sites/all/modules/ directory. If you don't really know how to download archives unpack them and upload them to your webserver, you can find a lot of tips and tricks for beginners at Lisa's 2createawebsite.com website. To get the IMCE module I do the same steps as for the fckeditor. Then I go to the Admininstration screen Administer-Site Building-Modules which shows me a list of all installed modules. I check the two new module entries for FCKEditor and IMCE so that it looks like the following screenshot.

Still there's more work to do! When you go to Administer-Site Configuration-FCKEditor you will see a warning like this.

So we need to manually download and install the Javascript files that are used to actually display the editing fields! I browse to http://ckeditor.com/download and make sure to download the FCKEditor version and not the newest CKEditor release! I then follow upload the zip file to my webserver and unpack it in the fckeditor module directory. After doing this I revisit the FCKEditor configuration page to see if all is ok now. But I'm now greeted with this:

For me this is fine for now as I'm using this site as User #1 who is the Drupal superuser and can always do everything! So for me there is no need to go there just yet. I will revisit this permission thing later when I add user roles for my friends who might want to post articles on this blog. But for now I enjoy the new editing feeling all by myself.

Good night and good luck!