Nodes: Inserting Images

While Drupal provides a lot of extensions and gimmicks, one of the big downsides currently is image handling. Basic image handling, like inserting images into a node’s body field are quite the task to achieve – there’s plenty of approaches but almost all fail at some point. Mostly because of bugs or lack of basic features. Basically, from the enduser point of view, a vanilla install of Drupal (stable/core) doesn’t provide any way of creating richtext content, including image embedding. Instead, there are like 7 different ways to do this. One of the things I would like to have changed in Drupal 7 is … While I’m typing this blog post in WordPress, I notice 2 things: first, I never had to worry a single second about WYSIWYG functionality. Second (and most important), media asset management and embedding options are already there, with all the gimmicks you can imagine. Or, to be more specific, with all the gimmicks you actually need. I wish to see the same approach for Drupal. I don’t want to choose between 8 different richtext-editors, nor between 4 different approaches on inserting an image into text. I want to have TinyMCE in the Drupal core and a streamlined image handling using CCK/FileField: a) because CCK is moved to core and b) because Insert (formerly known as “FileField Insert”) does this thing with a few tweaks already and so far is the most promising approach to streamlined content creation and editing. After all, it took me around half a year now to find an actually stable, easy to handle and overhead-less solution for this. Most of the functionality I’m currently using isn’t even marked “stable” yet, thus I’m taking a big risk for a feature which is considered “basic” from the enduser POV. Making content creation and media management easy is the whole point of a web content management system, isn’t it? Thus, I officially vote for a core solution for that! :-) I previously wrote that ImageAssist is a nice solution for exactly that. There’s a number of problems with IA which made me switch to a simpler solution (FileField/Insert): a) it doesn’t support ImageAPI/ImageCache/CCK, which is becoming the new de-facto standard for filehandling with D7, b) avoid using unnecessary JS based UI functionality if you rely on a colorful selection of components, c) I ran into all sorts of basic styling problems and wasn’t able to find workarounds for most of them, d) the usability is a pain, e) buggy and slow release cycles, f) and that is a general rule: avoid anything which opens a popup-window and is a key component. :P Keep it simple stupid, please.