Learning the World

As I alluded to yesterday, Firefox 3 on the Mac won’t accepted formatted text from other applications (most notably word). While this does mean that users don’t have to deal with the Word<->Firefox 3  extraneous code problem, also means that every document that gets cut and pasted into Firefox 3 is going to come in without any sort of formatting. This is a pain for folks who were used to this functionality in Firefox 2, and I expect that we’ll see more and more complaints about this as Firefox 3 achieves deeper penetration on campus.

There’s a report on this bug in Bugzilla; please vote for it. 

• Clipboard and drag-and-drop don’t interoperate with formatted text (e.g. HTML) on OS X

There’s also a good conversation about the issue, including possible workarounds, at MacRumors.com:

• Copy and Paste removes formatting – why?

Note that Safari on the Mac does not have this problem, but I’ve found Safari support in TinyMCE and CKEditor flaky at best (e.g. when cutting and pasting from Word into Safari using TinyMCE 2.x in Drupal, the resulting text will have random spaces removed from between words).

Update 11/7/2008

The patch that fixes this problem has been committed, so hopefully we’ll see this in production soon!

Firefox 3 for Windows has changed the way it handles copy and pasting text from other applications, such as Word, which in turn is causing extra code to show up in posts to a variety of web apps, including Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress. Firefox 3 for Mac has its own issues (namely it won’t copy/paste rich text from Word at all).

This Moodle Tracker report offers one scenario where the problem pops up. I encountered it earlier in the semester as well, and unfortunately the best workaround I had at the time was to tell folks to use IE to do cutting and pasting if they wanted to preserve their formatting (or copy/pasting into Notepad before pasting into Firefox 3 if they didn’t.

The extra code is style data that Firefox 2 omitted, but Firefox 3 includes:

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New
Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15
{mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;
mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> 

Digging around on the web, I found a post (”Pasting from Word in Firefox 3 Doesn’t Remove Meta/Style Tags”) that explains the problem:

The problem is due to that Firefox 3.0 is presenting itself to MS Word as a XML client and the content pasted in the editor has new format different to this one pasted in Firefox 2.0. That is why the regular expressions used by the editor’s Paste From Word filters are not stripping the new MS Word XML formatting. 

I can’t find anything in Bugzilla that speaks to this (my guess is that it would be viewed as a feature rather than a bug).  

My understanding is that there’s always extraneous code coming over from Word, but that the various WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, CKEditor) endeavor to strip out said code. The problem, aside from the fact that Firefox 3 has changed the way it does copy and paste, is that the editors haven’t caught up with the changes. I found posts for both editors discussing how to deal with this.

On the CKEditor site, there’s a tracker report about improving the editor itself:

• Ticket #2291: Simple copy & paste from Word document – extra code not stripped

The Social Media Classroom is an experiment in using Drupal to drive a Web 2.0 classroom. From the web site:

The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools.  The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. 

Interesting.  It’s based on Drupal 5.x and makes use of a huge number of modules — 61 to be precise. Among those included are activitystream, advanced_profile, chatroom, lightbox2, nodefamily, node review, panels, organic groups, seesmic, tagadelic and many, many more.

I think Drupal is a good fit for this kind of thing, though I’m curious to see how they polished up the Drupal interface to hide the rough edges from students and faculty (which has probably been our biggest stumbling block in using Drupal with our “Soapbox” web app at the college).

I think I’ll throw this on my Mac when I have a chance, but my biggest concern about this is keeping it current. They appear to be doing regular builds based on updates to Drupal’s CVS repository, but I’ve run into problems over the years with one module update mucking up a bunch of other modules. I imagine staying on top of those interactions is going to be a heck of a challenge for the SMC’s developers.

In looking at WordPress Mu as a possible lightweight CMS for campus organizations and departments, I’ve found myself on a quest … a quest to figure out if/how WordPress can display an inline list of posts from a given WordPress category.

So what do I mean by that? Well, consider this actual use example from the “Research Tools” database I ported over to Drupal for a recent Library redesign project. The original database contained a number of records relating to research tools (journals, indexes, etc.) relating to a particular subject area. These records were assigned to categories like “Africana Studies: Major Research Tools” and “Africana Studies: Other Research Tools”. The original database then dynamically served up lists of these research tools on a single “Africana Studies” themed web page.

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A demonstration of the very nifty Drupal Admin Module. I’ve been experimenting with using this module; it seems like a good way to expose the guts of Drupal, which can confuse even veteran users.

There’s a new listserv for librarians interested in Drupal: DRUPAL4LIB. You can join it via its archives page.It’s great to see there are enough people interested in using Drupal with library web sites to warrant such a list — so far it’s only seeing sporadic traffic, but I intend to start posting once I begin converting Lafayette’s library site to Drupal later this month.

The Drupal 6.0 beta 2 release is out. Among 6’s new features are support for OpenID, triggers for site events, theming improvements, a brand new menu system, and overhauled book and forum modules.

I haven’t tried installing it yet, either at work or home, so I’m not sure what these changes mean practically. I’m hoping we’ll see some sort of native support for secondary menus within Drupal (e.g. click on a primary navigation link, and it spawns 5 sublinks). I’ve had to hack together a solution on two of my three Drupal sites, and I’m not particularly happy with either of them.

The forum module was always clunky, at least when I tried to implement it, so I’m looking forward to trying that out as well.

I just found a podcast dedicated to all things Drupal: the Lullabot Podcast. It talks about the ongoing development work on the CMS, popular modules, deprecated practices, and interviews with people and companies using Drupal professionally.

I discovered it via the Drupal account on Twitter, once again showing that the microblogging service can actually be useful.

Some folks have put together a Drupal distribution designed for use in education. It uses the latest Drupal build, and I’m thinking of throwing an install of it on one of our test servers to see how it looks compared to Soapbox, which is running an older version of Drupal and which doesn’t have quite so many bells and whistles (and optional modules installed).

I upgraded my personal web site to Drupal 5.1 from Drupal 4.7 last week. The process went more smoothly than I expected; the majority of problems I experienced were related to my old 4.7-centric theme and a bit of a coding hack I did for my primary navigation on the site. I’m experiencing a few lingering CSS issues, namely none of the Ajax-collapsible menus will collapse and the editing blocks for forms aren’t lining up properly.

Rather than try and rework the existing theme (which itself was based on someone else’s 4.6 theme) into compliance with Drupal 5.1, I’m planning on starting from scratch with the new “Zen” theme. Zen was inspired by the CSS Zen Garden, and is designed to be modified — it includes a well-documented template and CSS file, which should make modifying things far easier. I wish it included Photoshop or PNG versions of all of its graphics so that the minor editorial graphics (like those use in the tertiary navigation) could be easily modified, but I love the concept — this is exactly what Drupal needed.

Bringing it back to education, Drupal powers two very difference sites at Lafayette: the Information Technology Services web site, in which it serves as a straight-forward, taxonomy-driven content management system, and Soapbox, which is our ongoing experiment with a community blogging platform.

Based on my experiences with my own site, I’m looking forward to upgrading Lafayette’s Drupal installations. The administrative interface for 5.1 is much cleaner and easier to navigate, and the collapsible admin field help keep pages streamlined when in edit mode.

A lingering problem we’ve had with Drupal refusing to obey the “break” tag in PHP pages is solved by the Node Teaser module, which lets you have a separate introductory teaser for a page or story (a la WordPress) while Secure Pages allows for secure logins without the hacks I’ve been forced to use in the past.

I haven’t found a particularly good image management option for Drupal yet, but there are a number of new options I plan on trying out. I’m also going to give the Audio module another whirl; it looks like a much more robust solution for podcasting than the default RSS 2.0 feeds that core Drupal creates.

Finally, the Views module offers some exciting possibilities with regards to displaying lists of content — Drupal’s default behavior is to list content as header-link-teaser, which works fine for blogs but can be problematic when you have 10+ pages worth of documents and want to be able quickly list and browse them. Views allows you to customize node lists within Drupal, and looks like the perfect solution to this usability problem.