The more I use Drupal, the more I like it. While not an easy program to master, you can find ton’s of information on how to use it.
The only drawback I’ve found with any content management system is, having to login to write posts, pages or book pages.
I like the idea of using an external editor and I’ve tested quite a few of them. While all of them are quite good, when it comes to Drupal and using a Mac I’ve found Marsedit to be the best choice for me.
I like having the preview feature, although I’ve found that it is not quite perfect when compared to the finished post viewed through a web browser. Still it is close enough to the finished product.
A Few Challenges I’ve found with Marsedit.
I should be more specific, with all external editors so far, and maybe someone does know the solution. The biggest issue is with the meta data.
I know I can enter keywords and tags, yet the feature I want is the meta description. Reading through the Marsedit forum, this is a feature that they are working on and will hopefully becoming in a future release.
Without the description the search engines of course pickup the first pieces of text that are crawled. This is not the description we want to show.
What I’ve done as a work around until this is implemented, is to publish everything as a draft, I hear you, what a pain. After I have finished the post, I still need to login to the site to add the meta description, then finally publish it.
One of the features I always look for in a computer system, is the ability to synchronize data between two computers. Marsedit by itself will not synch between two computers without other software, or will it?
We often don’t always finish a post right then and there, for example sometimes I’ll start a post on my Mac Pro, then I’ll finish it up in the evening with my MacBook Pro.
To get around this synch issues, I found that by saving the post as a draft, I am able to refresh the blog folder on the other computer within Marsedit and have a working copy on both the desktop and laptop. It very important to keep an awareness as to where you are at with any post, as you your really would not want to over write any work you’ve already done.
Over all I’d have to give the combination of Marsedit 2.2 and Drupal a 4.5 out of 5 star rating.