The Tragedy of Inline Images

I've had some time now to focus more on Drupal, and it's definitely pretty impressive. The extensibility is excellent, and in looking over my latest bookshelf addition, Pro Drupal Development, I can see that I'll be inundated with random bits of "oh I can do that?" for quite awhile.

Of course this presents me specifically with another problem, that being, how to focus my time. I can't imagine freshly stepping into PHP right now. I remember first seeing it in action at around version 3, and building small little guestbooks, and other random widgets.

My first PHP book extolled the virtues of a new and exciting project, proving PHP's legitimacy (that being osCommerce). Of course if you've taken a look at the code in osCommerce, it should be enough to scare you off PHP permanently, it's that bad.

On one hand, it's exciting to have all these new tools (like CodeIgniter and Drupal), but on the other I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for the pre-framework era of PHP.

Anyhow, more on random frameworks later. The issue at hand is something I would have imagined to be simple, but is actually turning out to be quite annoying.

Drupal doesn't ship with a "good" way of allowing images to be placed in content. In my searches, it sounds like I'm not the only one with this issue, and the number of image modules only highlights the differing philosophies on how this should be handled.

On one hand, having Drupal's pretty nifty plugin system has allowed for some furious module development, and I'm amazed at how something like a picture gallery can be hobbled together from 6-8 different modules all working in harmony.

Then again, knowing which 6-8 modules to download, and how to configure them to work with each other, isn't really an exercise in "fun", especially for a non power user who really just wants images to show up.

I'm not quite sure what the solution is, it looks like the Drupal community will have to figure out how they want to treat images internally first of all (ie, are images nodes?). This little problem seems to be one of those sensitive subjects each community deals with.

And ultimately, all that detracts from the basic issue, that being, how can I place images in my content easily.

There have been a few attempts to mimic wordpress's functionality in this regard, so it'll be interesting in seeing if this issue gets resolved in the near future.

I'm currently working on touching up Buildering.net, Ard Arvin's buildering home on the internet. Right now I'm thinking I'll have to roll my own module to help him with this little conundrum.

My current thinking is that I want a process that doesn't require a pop up window (I hate popups, even useful ones), allows images to be captioned easily, treats images as nodes (I think this is the correct way of thinking of them in Drupal), and allows it to play nice with other popular modules such as Lightbox2 or Thickbox.

Anyhow, there are a few more changes upcoming to buildering.net, I'll go over them when we're a bit closer to actually having things done.