Alternative ways to enter content
Drupal’s built-in form-based content editing approach is fine for many applications, but if you
have a lot of text to create, or you wish to convert existing content, or if you are using a
specialized content type such as a blog, it may be more convenient to use other approaches to
enter content into your Drupal-based site.
Preparing your content offline suggests some ways to use familiar software on your computer to
create or edit content before submitting it to Drupal.
Depending on what’s available on your site, you might even be able to enter new articles
without ever logging on to the site.
Drupal includes functionality for "blogging"--creating "blogs" or web-based journals. If this
functionality is enabled on your site, you may be able to input and edit content using one of a
number of desktop "blog" software packages. These allow you to simply type in content, hit a
"post" button, and have your content automatically loaded onto your site.
In fact, blogging software can be used for more than blogs--it can allow you to post content
easily and quickly to almost any part of a website. One such program is described below in
Posting and editing content with w.bloggar
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25 Aug 2006 Drupal Handbook
Before trying out one of the blogging programes, you might want to check with your site’s
maintainer to make sure it accepts blog posts. The key question to ask is: "Is the bloggerapi
enabled?" If the answer is yes, you’re ready to roll. If not, you could request that it be enabled to
allow you quick updates.
Posting and editing content with w.bloggar
w.bloggar is a gratis software for Windows designed for "blogs" (web-based journals).
If you’ve confirmed that blog support is enabled, here’s some steps to get going:
Download the software from http://www.wbloggar.com/ and install.
Set up a new account. This is explained in the w.bloggar help files.
When it comes time to set the "Blog Tool" selection, choose "MovableType" (and not
"Drupal"). This is because (at time of writing) the Drupal support in w.bloggar is
outdated.
For "Host" put the domain of the website you’re using, then for "Path" put the rest of
the address, if any, followed by "/xmlrpc.php". So if the address was
"http://www.gworks.ca/site/" you would put "www.gworks.ca" for host and
"site/xmlrpc.php" for Path. The "xmlrpc.php" part is the Drupal file that handles the
blogging input.
Now you’re ready to start posting. In doing so, you can take advantage of the text formatting
functionality w.bloggar offers. When correctly set up, posting a web page from w.bloggar is as
simple as opening the program, typing in some text, selecting a category (the "taxonomy term"
to use) and hitting post.
Preparing content offline
Before posting directly to a site, you may want to start in a word processing program. Potential
advantages include:
Saving time online. This is a particular consideration if you’re on dial-up.
Access to spell-check and other editing features.
Depending on how much formatting you wish to do, you could also consider using an HTML
editor. These include, for instance, the "composer" that comes with Mozilla and Netscape. Here
are the steps involved:
Type or copy and paste your text into the HTML editor.
Apply formatting as desired (e.g., bold, italics).
Bring up the HTML (encoded) view of the text.
This HTML is what you’ll copy and paste into Drupal’s input form, to have formatted copy.