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!

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 (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.

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.

In Drupal, I was able to do this by creating a custom content type called “Research Tools” and a taxonomy to go with it. I then imported all the tools into the Drupal database, and used the Views module to create queries for the different categories. I then embeded these Views inline on a page, creating a nicely formatted list of research tools. You can check out the live version, but here’s a screen shot for quick reference:

So the “Major Research Tools” component is one Views query, and “Other Suggested Research Tools” is another Views query.

All well and good … but how do I do this in WordPress?

Imagine the same scenario, but now my “research tool” entries have been added as posts. The posts have been added two different categories: “Major Research Tools” and “Other Research Tools”. I want to query WordPress for that information, and then display it inline on the page.

Here’s another example: a Career Services department might want to have a page that lists all of the internships-related posts on a page, but wants to break them into groups of “paid” and “unpaid” internships. Sure, they could manually maintain that list … but it sure would be nice if they didn’t have to. 

What I’m ultimately trying to do here is provide folks with some simple tools to get dynamic lists of content onto a page. So far, I haven’t come up with much; the common WordPress solution seems to be to hack the site templates to come up with these kinds of pages, which is fine for developers, but is at odds with one of the reasons why we’d want to roll out WordPress: ease of use and ease of maintenance.

I’d rather give people a toolbox than have to handcraft each tool for them. I’m not opposed to doing so in special cases — sometimes you really do need a hydrospanner, but in most cases you don’t.

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

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.