Drupal social publishing software

Following up on yesterday's post this is a quick and dirty guide to adding images to blog posts using imagecache and Lightbox v2. The effect of these together is to create an image like the one in this post. When clicked the image will display in an overlay on this page thanks to lightbox. Imagecache handles making a static copy of the image available and resizing the image to provide several predefined sizes.

It is possible to do similar things in much better ways. For example creating an image field and a template for displaying posts that include the image. This method is a quick and dirty method using a minimum of additional modules. With Drupal 6 the FlexiFilter module will make this method even simpler.

The first step is to setup the necessary modules (imagecache and lightbox v2). The imagecache handbook page has some information about setting up presets for imagecache. The latest version of imagecache has new settings that deprecate some of the old settings. See the image in this post for a glance at what is in the newest CVS version.

It has been a busy 2008 so far. I spent the first full week of the year at the Lullabot Drupal API workshops in beautiful, rainy, Portland. It didn't take long to figure out that I also really wanted to head off to the themeing workshops in February as well. I came home ready to wrap up a couple of projects and spend countless hours working on patches and uber-cool modules and hacks for all kinds of sites.

All went well on Sunday as I moved several sites and did a little database trickery to make things hum along. When I shut down for the day early Monday morning things were buzzing right along. Murphy, however, was hard at work. A problem with the server resulted in the need to rebuild the whole box from scratch. Even more fun it is a remote server and the backups weren't working as well as they should have been.

The hits just keep piling up this week. This time it is a great new Drupal module called Visualize Backtrace which will be a boon for Drupal developers all over. It even comes with an introductory screencast showing it's awesomeness. To get it working it requires ZGRViewer and XDebug and a little behind the scenes tinkering but I can't wait to install and have this tool for testing.

One of the things about doing Drupal development is one is always searching for information. There are many great sources of information and things like Planet Drupal that are a wealth of information. Then there are sites like the API site and sites for PHP and MySQL manuals that come in handy for other things. To make it easier to search the areas I needed I setup a Google Custom Search Engine for Drupal developer search. Please feel free to add additional sites that would be useful. Presently in addition to the main drupal.org sites it searches Planet Drupal, PHP, MySQL, and w3's CSS documentation.