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.