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.

It is generally recognized that theming, and more specifically the availability of both good-looking high quality themes and skilled theme developers remains one of Drupal's most important Achilles' heels, in spite of a lot of efforts to attract designers to the Drupal community, and to make Drupal theming easier. The Drupal forums are filled with "Drupal theme designer wanted" posts and with people complaining that there are really not that much ready-to-go themes available. Any theme-related change in Drupal core, such as the addition of Garland and the color picker has been cheerfully welcomed.

From my own experience of developing personal blogs and Drupal sites for rather small businesses, I can tell that a lot of non-tech people value the quality of their new website's design even higher than the functional power. Only when they are told the cost of hiring a specialized developer to create a brand new and unique Drupal theme for their business or organisation, a lot of "small" potential Drupal site owners get frustrated quickly and may start to look elsewhere. Some may argue that this kind of users is not the target audience of the Drupal project, but I disagree. I am sure that by dramatically increasing the number of relatively simple Drupal themes this group of Drupal users will grow exponentially.

Well, I was sure of that. Right now, I'm not so sure anymore since the facts contradict the theory. For example, about five months ago, Jeff Eaton announced his Gutenberg module. This module allows you to download Movable Type styles and install them as if they were genuine Drupal themes. There is a wealth of these styles available, such as the really nice ones of The Style Contest. Obviously, this isn't the ultimate solution, but if the demand for Drupal themes was so high, one would expect Drupal users to literally eat such a project alive. However, all of this didn't happen - as far as I can see at least. After testing the module, I must admit that there are some bugs, and that not all MT styles work right out of the box. But that wouldn't bother a convinced Open Source user. He or she would simply file issues in the patch queue to help squash those bugs. There are only six issues for the Gutenberg project in total.

Now why did this happen? Was this project not sufficiently promoted? Or is the demand for Drupal themes not that high after all? I would be really interested in another download statistics update to see how the theme-related modules are performing, because I'm a bit confused here...