Calling Planet Drupal and other experts -- Sharon could use a little help. I'll admit that I don't know how to install or upgrade Drupal myself; other people do it for me. I say that if Sharon actually installed Drupal herself, she's plenty tech savvy, and I'm impressed. From her post:
Perhaps the answers to my questions could be summed up with "People who aren't tech savvy ought not to be using Drupal," but I'm going to ask anyway. Does anyone have suggestions for ways to simplify the use of Drupal.
I'd like to add modules for wysiwyg text editing and other user-friendly options. I've found the Drupal handbooks and the Drupal discussion groups and reviews of various add-ons. The instructions themselves are not all that intuitive, though, and they seem to presume that they don't have to list all of the necessary steps in the process because anyone using this software would only need a brief prompt in the right direction.
About the wysiwyg text editor, I know Kairosnews used to have that, but I looked in the modules and couldn't find it. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough or wasn't looking in the right place, though. Did something happen to that feature? (Cross-posted)
DrupalEd was just released
http://www.drupaled.org/
It has the WYSIWYG editor enabled by default apparently.
kairosnews wysiwyg
WYSIWYG's are not a standard component of Drupal because the ones which Drupal uses are independent open source projects. Drupal has a few available, but since they are based on software designed by others, each has it's own idiosyncrasies, and sometimes, the newest version of one works better than another. So when I upgrade the site, I have to evaluate the ones that are available and install one. Just haven't gotten to it yet because I'm not including them with my course websites which use the latest version of Drupal.
If you'd like to research and evaluate them, let me know which one to install.
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Charlie | cyberdash
WYSISC
What You See Is Sloppy Code.
I've experimented quite a bit with WYSIWYG editors and have always been extremely disappointed. They tend to slow down a site, and the code they produce is seldom pretty. I much prefer off-line editors for that kind of thing. If you don't want to use Word and paste it in, you might want to try W.Bloggar. It interfaces with Drupal as long as the Blog API module is activated (it's current not activated on Kairosnews).
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Check out Barton's gaming blog at Armchair Arcade.
blog api
Since I leaned down the extra services on Knews in the last week or so, the site seems much more stable than it has been in previous weeks. This could be due to outside factors (e.g., other sites on the webhost server using less resources). Could be because of all of the spammer efforts to create new accounts that has now been slowed with the captcha module. But it could also be that one of the extra services was the resource hog that was causing the problem.
If you want to turn the blog api back on, just keep an eye on whether knews starts having problems again.
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Charlie | cyberdash