Last spring we moved our districts web pages over to drupal. Since then we have been helping teachers that would like to have their own page build one in druapl. For the most part we have used either book pages for them or just a single page. The issue we have ran into is that elementary teachers tend to want their page to be, for lack of a better word, cute. Like they want graphics of teddy bears or cartoon characters.. etc. So far we have also been having teachers build their page in iWeb if they prefer to do that and then we just create an iframe in drupal to add it to their schools page.
So my question is there an easy way to give teachers an easy way to make more grachic friendly pages in drupal? Or is this a losing battle and I just should leave them with iWeb and iframe their pages? Keep in mind this is elementary school teachers so their tech level and willingness to learn tech skills is not the highest for most of them.
Comments
Clip Art
If you use the wsiwyg module with say FCKedtor the IMCE plug in and IMCE WSWYG bridge plug in the image button in the web page editor would bring up a folder on the server to upload and and browse images. You could then upload a bunch of clip art to the folder or a sub folder named clip art... plus each time an instructor uploaded a new piece of clip art it would be available to everyone or at least everyone on that drupal install. Its not an elegant solution but it would work. The larger issue is licensing. Clip art collections are usually licensed on a per computer install. So you would need a license for each instructors machine editing... Though one could make the argument the only install is the repository on the server.
You are really close to having them do the work in drupal. I would not give up the battle. Our goal here is to get the people with the information entering it into the final system whenever possible. Acting as a middle man setting up iframes means they have to go through you every time they want to change something. Moving everyone into drupal for editing is a noble goal worth pursuing.
Mike Hathaway
mike@mikehathaway.com
http://www.mikehathaway.com
Re: Customizing Teacher Pages
Have the teachers create a "model page" (use the WYSIWYG editor to position clip art, choose the fonts, colors, etc.) - and submit it to your school's Drupal Themer to create a sub-theme based on it.
There are plenty of ways to associate a sub theme by author. Easy if you assign URL alias paths by user name and role (school.k12.ny.us/teachers/user-name).
You can assign the themes via the sections module... but depending on the number of teachers you're talking about, it might make more sense to do it in code.
Either Drupal finds a page-teachers-user-name.tpl.php file (which invokes that teacher's subtheme) or not (in which case, defaults to page.tpl.php and no sub-theme).
-Bram
http://gamefacewebdesign.com
themer
We currently use the wysiwyg api with tinymce but we do not use imce at all. I could install it but the way things have taken off already it would be hard to get our users moved over to using a new file manager. My hope is that tinymce and webFM integration will progress enough where I can use that more and more. I initially setup imagepicker which was a mistake. It is good module but every user has their own image collection so there is not an easy way to provide a folder of images for everyone to access.
Creating a sub theme is an interesting idea but I could see that becoming to much to handle for our staff of three techs in the district.
RE: Creating a Subtheme
Sometimes the simplest choice may be all the "empowerment" a teacher needs....
Subthemes can be as simple as adding on a final CSS file (different color schemes, different fonts, different background image).
I'd do an afterschool "Theme Sprint" - and invite some high school kids who know CSS to help out! I'm sure you've got CSS coders among the high schoolers.
As far as IMCE goes - it doesn't hurt anything, why not try it? it maps onto both "every user has their own" AND "shared image directory" - you get to offer multiple paths.
-Bram
http://gamefacewebdesign.com
webfm
That brings up another thing I've been contemplating. I really like the webFM module and would like to move toward using that for our users once the integration with the current wysiwyg api works a bit better. But would imce be better? I have not used IMCE extensively so most of my experience is with webFM.
I would avoid both WebFM and IMCE
Try Filefield, Insert, and the Image resize filter -- there are some others you can add, but these will get you started.
http://drupal.org/project/filefield
http://drupal.org/project/insert
http://drupal.org/project/image_resize_filter
These solutions move you toward a standard way of treating all files/assets, and will also be easier to maintain down the road, as this solution will integrate cleanly with the Media module, which will likely become the way to handle files in D7.
My .02 --
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
I like that
One of the things I have been trying to avoid, but sort of stuck myself with anyways, is to get to tied down to one module unless I was fairly certain it was going to be the way to go for the future. I think I am going to do some testing on our dev site with those three modules. Inserting images and links to other files is not the most user friendly on our current site so I really want to come up with a good solution for our users. Right now we sort of use a little of webFM, imagepicker, and file attachments but it would be nice to pull all this together.
another use
It seems that using the cck filefield along with views can be a great way to handle document management. On our development site I created a new content type called file upload, removed the body from it, and added a field for file uploads. I added a taxonomy vocabulary to the content type as well, just for organizational. Then with views it's pretty simple to create a page that will list all of the uploaded files with a delete button, date posted, and other information in a nice table.
I had been looking at using filebrowser or webfm for this but this seems to be a lot more flexible. The only downside is that after the initial setup we'll have to upload around 200 documents, one at a time. Anyone have any thoughts on this?