A decent WYSIWYG-editor shipped with Drupal core is a much requested feature. Until that happens, there are other interesting ways around. For example, a lot of people, including myself, are using Google Docs to manage documents online. It is really easy to publish these documents to your Drupal website using blogapi module, which is part of Drupal core.

Using Google Docs to post to your website has a lot of advantages:

• you can write your content using an easy to use rich text editor
• you can easily share your documents for editing/reviewing with other people before publising them
• a spell checker is automatically available in more than 30 languages
• you can easily upload images from your computer, and insert, rescale and position them in your document: when you publish the document to your website, Google Docs automatically creates an image tag pointing to the image at the Google servers
• when your document has been changed (or you want to roll back to a previous revision), you can update the content on your website with one simple click

The only problem with this approach is that on a lot of Drupal websites, the default input format is set to filtered HTML. Especially if comments are enabled on your site, you don't want to allow everyone to use the full HTML format. However, Google Docs obviously produces a lot more complex HTML than what is generally allowed by the filtered HTML format, and when it publishes your document to your website this will result in a really messy post. The solution to this problem is to install default filter module, which allows you to assign a different default input format to different roles. Since Google Docs authenticates using your own user account, you can set the full HTML format as the default for your role, and all will be good.

The following short tutorial shows you how you can set this up (Drupal 5.x). An example of a post published using Google Docs can be found here.

The Dutch online IT magazine webwereld.nl reports that hosting providers such as Digitalus and D-hosting are increasingly being confronted with all sorts of problems caused by security vulnerabilities in the content management systems used by their clients.

Joomla, Drupal and Mambo are the three cms's mentioned in the article as the main culprits (or at least, the users of these systems not updating their software). The hosting providers were able to solve part of the issues by changing some PHP settings, but also continuously urge their customers to apply security updates as soon as they become available.

Luckily, the update module, which notifies the user as soon as there's a new version available of a module that is currently in use, will ship with Drupal 6. Hopefully this will ease the pain a bit.

On the other hand, the GPL states that anyone is free to modify or extend the software to their liking, so security issues will always exist and are often beyond the control of the software community itself.

On a side note, the article mentions that 10% to 20% of D-hosting's clients use Joomla. No statistics were given for Drupal though.

The people from Indymedia and Quadrupal are organizing a Belgian Drupal Summerschool this month, an idea that emerged from the Belgian Drupal User Group meetings.

The workshop, entitled "I installed Drupal. What's next?", aims at beginning Drupal developers and end-users and covers all the Drupal basics such as installing modules and themes, setting permissions, working with nodes and cck, ...

Participants are asked a modest contribution fee which will be entirely donated to the Drupal Association.

A big thanks to the organizers for promoting and teaching Drupal in Belgium, and for supporting the Drupal Association!

From drupal.org:

The Drupal Association wants you to be informed about what is happening, and welcomes any feedback or suggestions you may have to help Drupal flourish. In addition to the official Association announcements that you can find on the front page of the Drupal Association site we are glad to announce the Drupal Association Planet.

Association-related blog posts made by Permanent Members of the Drupal Association will keep you up-to-date about the most recent developments. We are committed to make sure that all relevant comments to these blog posts will reach the Board of Directors or the General Assembly.

We just had our 200th registrant signing up for DrupalCon Barcelona. This is great news, and I'm sure a lot of other people are planning on joining us as well.

We have a great location with plenty of space, so that shouldn't be a problem. However, keep in mind that La Mercè, a huge yearly Barcelona street festival, is being held during the weekend of DrupalCon. This is definitely an extra reason to visit Barcelona in September, but it also causes the accomodation to become rather scarce and pricy the more the date approaches. Therefore, if you want to attend the best DrupalCon ever and you didn't register yet, now is the time to act! Make sure not only to create an account at barcelona2007.drupalcon.org but to complete the whole registration process and to pay the registration fee of 50 euro.

We're also still looking for people wanting to give a presentation, so if there's anything Drupal you'd like to talk about, just login to the DrupalCon website and click the 'create content' link. Sessions range from the beginner to the die hard programmer level so there's definitely a place for your ideas!