Drupal 7 Views & Insert Make it Look Good

When building Drupal based websites there are some contributed modules that are more or less obligatory to install. Views is one of those. My guesstimate is that it is used on at least 95% of all live production websites, if not more.

Last weekend I finally got around to enable it for Nutshell, as well as create a much better looking homepage. To complement it I also installed the Insert and Image Resize Filter modules to make it easier to embed photos and illustrations in the content. I'm sure you agree that it has made my post come alive much more.

Views for Drupal 7

The Views module for Drupal 7 is currently only available in a developer version. There are still quite a few quirks and things missing, but generally it is working very well. I had to make a few compromises due to that, but even so the end result on the homepage is eons better than it was before.

Right now it is only used on the homepage, but when I get a little time over I will add more views such as:

• Keep improving the homepage.
• A new blog homepage.
• Better looking taxonomy term pages.
• Put it to good use for the RSS feeds.

I will of course also create a bunch of blocks, some to replace blocks used now and others to enhance your user experience here on Nutshell.

Insert for Drupal 7

The Insert module, currently in alpha version, for Drupal 7 is another module I just enable for Nutshell. It makes it very easy to embed images into content, especially in combination with the WYSIWYG module and a rich text editor such as the CKEditor which I use here.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Insert gives you the ability to select the image style you want to use when embedding the image. Then you just place the cursor where you want the image and click Insert. Insert will make sure that an image based on the style you selected is generated and cached. Couldn't be much easier than that.

Image Resize Filter for Drupal 7

To complement Insert I have also enabled the Image Resize Filter module. It is a perfect complement since it allows you to scale inserted images on the fly in rich text editors such as CKEditor. Sure you can do that without it as well, but the difference is that Image Resize Filter will generate a cached image of the exact same size as you scaled it to. Without it your visitors would have been downloading the original sized image and then have their browser scale it down. Imagine the waste if you scale down an image to only 20% of the original size!

Some of the advantages with this is:

• Much faster page loading times.
• Less bandwidth used.
• No need to create image styles for sizes that are rarely used.

What about the Media module?

The Media module, which I wrote about in my Multimedia Support in Drupal 7 with the Media Module post, is going to be the future of media management in Drupal. It will not only give you most, if not all, of the features the Insert and Image Resize Filter offers, it will also manage any other file you want to upload to your Drupal website from a uniform user interface and a media browser.

That doesn't mean it will render these two modules useless. There are plenty of situations where the Media module will be too much and Insert, in combination with Image Resize Filter, will be a much better fit. It all depends on what kind of content will be published on the website. They are easy to install, configure, use and does exactly what it says on the tin.

I hope you enjoy the new look of my posts and the homepage. Feel free the use the comment form below to give me feedback on what you think of the new look or media management in Drupal.