Website Tips (5)

The story is the simplest type of content to start with, and I try to avoid using an online html editor for a number of reasons. But, realistically most people want to use some html markup. The internet after all wouldn't be what it is without links, images, colors and other stuff that might be functional or just fun and prettier than basic text. For users who just want a few of these, learning how to do a link and images with html and the Drupal plain text edit box works.

Links are created with an anchor tag that brackets the text something like this:

<a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">my link to yahoo</a>

When you save it, the anchor tag disappears and the text becomes a link. In Drupal, the administrator must allow Filtered or Full HTML when creating stories for any of this to work. Otherwise, you will end up with just plain text.

The next structure is the image. In Drupal, there are a number of ways to do this. If you have ftp or some other way of getting images to your server in a place where they are available over the web, then you can use that to upload them and then just put in the needed markup to display them. The way that I like to put them in, is with the Drupal upload module. The administrator must enable the module, then make it available to authorized users. After that is done, there should be a new Attachments section at the bottom when you are creating stories and other content. Use the attachment feature to upload the image then put the image in your story like this:

<img src="/files/my-image.gif" />

The http and web site domain name are unnecessary if the image is on this site. There are lots of variations and extras, but that is the simplest way to put an image in your story. You will probably want to uncheck the "List" checkbox next to the image. Otherwise, Drupal will show this as an optional download for readers of your story. You might want to "List" the file if it were some other kind of extra document that you were providing for readers.

A last small but useful bit of information that isn't obvious to most users is that stories/blog posts and such appear that appear on the front page are truncated and show only the first 600 characters or so. This is usually done nicely and readers can either click on the story title or a link below the excerpt to see the entire story. If you (writer) wants to control exactly where this breaks, insert this:

<!--break-->

It won't display, but will tell the system that you want it to break not at 600 characters but at that spot. The 600 character threshold can also be changed or turned off by the administrator.

Testing an image insert: