A blog editing improvement

This time last week, I complained mightily because I tried to write a blog post in Drupal's browser text entry form and lost it in progress. Drupal 6 did not have any way to save drafts in progress.

This time this week, it does: the Autosave module, just today, got an upgrade for Drupal 6.

I tested the new release with this post. It works as designed, best I can tell. It stores drafts in a Drupal database table. If you go awry with the browser history, or your browser crashes completely, you can open a new session to create content (same type as the draft), and see a prompt that allows you to recover the last saved draft. Drupal site administrators can set how often it creates a new autosaved draft -- it defaults to 10 seconds, but that seems too frequent. I'm trying 30 seconds for now.

So Autosave solves the No. 1 problem I whined about last week. My other beef centered on the lack of a good, fast, powerful, built-in rich text editor. I hear Drupal 7 may offer promising solutions in this area, but in the meantime, I simply made a couple of quick adjustments to the entry form and to BUEditor, the module I use to create easy HTML markup buttons.

I added a BUEditor button for a tag I use regularly, <blockquote>. Then I altered the style for the text entry area to resemble, closely, the text you see when you read posts here. Now when I preview a post in BUEditor, it looks a lot like the real thing -- and I don't have to save a draft to the database to see it.

That's two small steps for blog editing in Drupal, one giant leap for my sanity.