The Drupal body field editor setup checklist

As any Drupal developer will tell you a fresh Drupal install requires a lot of modules and configuration refinements to provide the kind of core functionality that is commonly needed on almost any project. While there are some great lists of starter modules online I wanted to focus on the refinements needed specifically for creating a human-friendly rich text editor for the body field.

Here is my checklist for setting up the body field editing experience:

1. A rich text editor (consider Wysiwyg)
2. The ability to upload, insert and style an image anywhere in the body (sadly this means the IMCE module)
3. The ability to easily add captions to images (consider the Image Caption module)
4. Style control for bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, alignments, font size, style, face and color, insert link, insert image, number and bullet list, indent and outdent, blockquote, HTML mode and summary break
5. An easy way to insert videos from YouTube, Blip.TV, etc (consider Emfield and the included module Embedded Inline Media)
6. Refined input filters to allow all of this HTML to be shown

Based on feedback I frequently hear during Drupal deployments there are two big items missing from this list: an asset browser (for file uploaded like PDFs and images) and a powerful content list.

The core content list in Drupal doesn’t offer key features like robust sorting and filtering. In addition, there isn’t a tool that lists the assets uploaded to the site, making it hard to know what files might be available over time. This asset browser would function much like a beefed-up content list, providing a filterable and sortable list of all assets in the site, and where they are used.

(The best existing option for asset browsing that I have used is the upload tool in the IMCE editor. As for the content list, granted views can provide some of this functionality, but it isn’t an ideal search interface. A single module that offered these features would be most handy.)

Still, with powerful editing features a beefed-up body field is a strong feature of Drupal and a welcome tool to any human web content editor.