working on applications and technology

CMS like drupal often comes with its own online blogging interfact for easy article writing, the famous interface like fckeditor has word-like interface and easy to use. But It is online, We have to connect to the internet to use it for our writing.

If you 're a fruitful writer and have a lot to publish on your website, It 's better that we could get some client tools on our laptop, we don't have to connect to the internet when writing our story, and do the upload and publishing only after finishing the articles.

Zoudry Raven is one of the best tools for this task, Best of all It 's open source and free, It works with Drupal and a lot of other popular CMS system. After using it for the first time, you don't want to go online to write your article again.

And here 's the screenshot.

Steps to setup Zoudry Raven with Drupal

It is easy to setup Zoudry Raven to work with Drupal:

1. Setup Drupal to work with client tools: to enable the use of client tools, we have to setup drupal to grant some previlige to the client tools.

   First we should enable the 'Blog Api' module, then go to 'Site Configuration' to configure the 'Blog Api' module:

   

   The 'Blog Api' module allow us to setup content type that could be used by client tools like Zoundry Raven,

   

2. Configure Zoundry Raven to work with Drupal: configuring Zoundry Raven is easy and wizard-guided.

   First create account for your website, enter your main web site url and most likely that Zoundry Raven will regonize the CMS we 're using

   

   Select Drupal in the dropdown list and the username and password of the drupal

   

   Select the content type you want to work with

   

   Zoundry Raven could download your current exist web site post (So zoundry raven could serve as your website content backup tools!)

   

   Finally we 're done setting up zoundry raven.

   

One of zoudry raven 's best feature is that It could notifiy lots of web site index service after publishing your content , Drupal 's native module only notify one of these web index service, but Zoundry Raven do much more about it.

But Zoundry Raven is far from perfect, The weakness of this client blog writer tool (and many other tools) is image uploading, Although Zoundry Raven has a few image upload options (native, ftp, picasa, flickr...), But except from posting image to the online image service like picasa and flickr, I find the other option useless and I never figure out how to configure the tools right! I have to write the article using Zoundry Raven and then go online to insert image!