Drupal 6.5 was released October 8th and I realized that I had missed a couple of releases. I installed the update and everything worked flawlessly.

Update: The blog API module still has an impedance mismatch between RSD and posting. It hands out “1″ in response to an RSD query but expects “blog” when posting. So once again I had to re-apply the RSD patch for the Blog API module.

Drupal 6.2 was released today. It addresses a security vulnerability that affects Drupal 6.x sites that have multiple users, as well as a variety of other bug fixes. I upgraded from 6.1 to 6.2 without difficulty. However, I did have to re-apply the RSD patch for the Blog API module.

Drupal Modules as of 11/9/07

Originally uploaded by kentbye

If your blog is powered by Drupal you can blog images and videos from Flickr. This blog post was created with Flickr. First I found an image that was relevant, interesting and licensed under Creative Commons. I decided to use the image to the right which displays a graphical snapshot of the available Drupal modules. Then I clicked the button that appears above images along with the more familiar controls. That button sent me to a Flickr blog form where I typed the blog title and content. Then I posted the entry directly to this blog. (Once I had posted it I opened it with MarsEdit to polish it and add some additional images.)

If you want to try blogging from Flickr you need to make sure you have both the Blog and Blog API modules enabled and configured in Drupal. You can see what modules are enabled and enable or disable additional modules at Home » Administer » Site building » Modules on your blog. You should also check the Drupal user permissions and verify that your users have permission to create blog entries using the Blog module and permissions to add content with the Blog API module. The user permission are found at
Home » Administer » User management » Permissions. Your permission settings for blogging should be similar to mine (see below).

If you are running Drupal 6.x you may also need to apply a patch to the Blog API module to fix this issue.

Once your site has the Blog API module enabled and configured you can add your blog to your Flickr account. Open the Your account / Blogs page in Flickr and click Setup your blog. Flickr needs to know what kind of blog you have and lets you choose from a list of blog types that it knows about. For Drupal-powered blogs you need to select MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog.

Next you will need to configure your login details. The API Endpoint is the URL for the blog API. For Drupal with the Blog API module the API Endpoint would be http://www.yourblog.com/xmlrpc.php. You also need to enter your username and password so that Flickr can use RSD to retrieve your blogs details and capabilities.

Depending on your Drupal configuration, you may be prompted to choose a blog. The Drupal Story and Page content types may be listed in addition to Blog entry. If that is the case, just choose the user: blog entry from the list.

After selecting the blog you will have an opportunity to review your blog settings. By default Flickr will store your password and you won't need to enter it when blogging. If you prefer not to let Flickr store your password be sure to uncheck the box before continuing.

You can also select a custom posting template. There are several standard layouts to choose from. Or if you are comfortable with HTML and CSS, you can create a customized template of your own. Finally, you can create a test post from theYour account / Blogs page. If everything worked the way it is supposed to you should see a test post from Flickr on your blog. Now go blog some Flickr images!

Drupal 6.0 RC4 was released yesterday and I downloaded it and took it for a spin. The good news is that the problems I reported here and here have been fixed.

The bad news is that after installing it and running the update I could not post a new blog entry with MarsEdit 2. When I tried to post a test message I received this error dialog:

The problem is related to the “Blog ID” that is configured in MarsEdit's blog settings and the way Drupal handles that blog ID:

When MarsEdit auto-detects the blog ID it gets a value of “1″. For Drupal 6.0 RC3 and prior the blogapi.module was mapping the blog ID to a content type. A blog ID of “1″ mapped to a content type of “blog”. Starting with RC4 that mapping was removed. RC4 treats the blog ID and the content type as synonomous. This was causing the function _blogapi_validate_blogid to fail because it was trying to validate that the current user had permissions to publish a content type of “1″ but the content type should actually be “blog” instead.

The fix for this is to change the blog ID in MarsEdit to “blog” as shown here:

Changing the blog ID to “blog” allows posting and does not appear to have any negative side affects.

Update: Apparently the change was intentional in Drupal and the issue persists in versions 6.0 and 6.1. All of the functions in blogapi.module that need a blog ID are expecting a blog ID of “blog” now. Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software pointed out the the incorrect blog ID is being returned by Drupal's RSD function. This is causing any blogging software that uses RSD for auto-discovery to get the wrong blog ID which in turn causes the problems described earlier in this post. The blog ID is hardcoded to “1″ in blogapi.modules's RSD function. I submitted a patch to change the blog ID returned by the RSD function in blogapi.module to “blog” so that RSD auto-discovery will work correctly with MarsEdit and hopefully other blogging clients as well. You can also view and download the patch here.