One of the criticisms one hears about Drupal is that it does not include a WYSIWYG editor in the the core distribution.  I've never had much of an opinion about this one way or the other.  I do most of my substantial writing locally and use the old copy and paste technique to get the resulting xHTML that is generated into Drupal. 

For a number of years, I used an html editor called HomeSite for generating and testing my web pages and also as the tool for writing articles and blog posts.  It's not a WYSIWYG tool, but I've become quite adept at inserting the xHTML markup as I'm composing text over the years.  My mode of operation has changed recently and this is why:

To set the background for the remainder of this post, bear with me as I digress a bit. I had heard of  Windows Live Writer  (WLW), which is a WYSIWYG blog publishing application and decided to try it out as the tool for composing posts to my WordPress blog.  I had no great expectations as I was quite aware of the bloated xHTML markup generated by other Microsoft products such as Word.  Well, much to my surprise,  WLW not only  interfaced  seamlessly with WordPress, but it also generated efficient xHTML markup too.  And, in my opinion, has a feature set that is comparable with most of the embedded editors I have seen in various CMS and Blog software packages.  End of digression...

This got me to thinking.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use WLW with Drupal?  Well, I did some looking around and discovered that there is a 3rd-party module called Windows Live Writer BlogAPI. No doubt I was probably one of the last people in Drupal Land to find out about this!

I downloaded and installed the WLW-Blog API module and it works great.  As a matter of fact, I am sitting here composing this post using WLW.

So what has this all got to do with Drupal not having a WYSIWG editor in the core?  Well, for many who have Windows on their desktops, the absence of a WYSIWYG editor in Drupal's core becomes a non-issue, provided they install WLW.

Now to find a comparable application for my Linux laptop.  Anybody have a suggestion?

Drupal 6 RC2 was released yesterday.  And, I must also say that the more familiar I have become with Drupal 6, my previous opinion that building Drupal themes is not as straightforward as building Joomla! templates has mellowed quite a bit.

Why the change of heart, you ask?  Read on to find out...

I decided to take my tried and true (but somewhat dated) Joomla! template and create a theme for Drupal 6 that more or less has the same layout.  And I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was not nearly as difficult and time-consuming as I had anticipated.  Much more straightforward than Drupal 5.

For a comparison of the two, take a look at my messy and disorganized Drupal 6 RC test site...and my equally messy and disorganized e Joomla! 1.5 RC test site.

Disclaimer: This is not saying that Drupal is better than Joomla! or vice versa.  I use both of them and think they are both outstanding examples of the goodness that open source brings...as is my old friend Wordpress and many other open source software packages I use or have used in the past

Drupal 6 RC1 was released on 21 December.  The last Beta (4) was fairly stable so maybe it won't be too long until a Drupal 6 stable release hits the streets.  I think there's a good chance that the Drupal 6 and Joomla! 1.5 stable releases might occur within weeks (or maybe days) of each other.

I've been fooling with both Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 for quite a while now.  Both are significant improvements over their predecessors.  For example, Joomla! 1.5 has made significant improvements in their SEF implementation and intoduced template overrides; Drupal has made significant improvements in caching and has also simplified theming.  Buildng Drupal themes is still not as straight forward as templating in Joomla!, but this lastest release takes a big step in the right direction.

Congrats to both the Drupal and Joomla! core teams for making my two favorite CMS's even better!

Today, Packt Publishing announced that Drupal was the winner of its annual Overall Open Source Content Management System Award for 2007.  

Joomla!, which was last year's winner in this category, placed second in the voting and also won the Best PHP Open Source Content Management System category award.  Drupal garnered second place in that one.

I've been a Joomla! user since the project's inception and have been using Drupal now for the better part of a year.   It's nice to see both of them recognized for their contributions to the open source community and to the IT community at large.