Drupal wysiwyg image upload

Most of my Drupal projects involves creating easily updated webpages for non-technicians. Usually anything more complicated than a WordPress blog and the client will be completely lost. Finding good UI solutions is therefore often key.

For easy node creation and editing I’m nowadays using the CKEditor Module, which is really beautiful and gives the client a familiar interface if they’ve ever used text editors. The one problem is that it does not, from start, support image upload.

One solution to this is buying the commercial product CKFinder and use it in combination. This is most likely a great solution, this far though I’ve settled for a ‘hack’ that lets you combine the CKEditor with the IMCE module for uploads, which also works great and is free to use. The details on installing it can be found here and to get the IMCE integration to look as good as possible (also since IMCE by default looks like shit), take a look at this.

Update January 9 2011:

My currently preferred solution to wysiwyg image upload is to use CCK imagefields to upload the files, then the module insert to insert them into the node body. Once inserted you can open them up with the CKEditor image option to set various properties. The main reason for using this approach is that it stores the image data with the node, which makes it much easier to migrate all images with the nodes in the future. Also, this approach is easy to combine with imagecache and lightbox2 to create dynamic image popups and displays.

If it’s not a specific wish from the customer to be able to add images in the body though, I prefer having a view handle the images separately from the whole body text, to make it harder for the end user to screw up the layout.