I had some kind soul build a patch to allow htmlarea to use the new forms api that drupal is using. I found this really cool, and I have applied it.

This actually gave me the boost I needed and I fixed up all problems the use of the hook_form_alter() and now is working really great.

ATM HTMLArea is the only WISIWYG editor that will work with Drupal 4.7. I am not sure on the status of the others or how far off they are. I know that tinymce might be a little while as Matt is quite busy ATM, unless he has some kind soul make the change. 

Well I have been doing alot of work laterly on my little htmlarea module for drupal. With the new menu extensions, I have been able to create add alot more to the configuration to get the best out of htmlarea.

Thanks to a little help from the Australian Industry Group I have been able to make alot of new features available, Such things as a new link plugin, that will allow uploading of files into filestore2, and the new plugin configuration infrustructure so now plugins like the CSS plugin which require addition parameters to be passed can be added and configured much like the rest of htmlarea.

Also I have been working on allowing better configuration of some of the pull down lists like fonts to be configured. As you can see I now have a "Code" block on the block pull down list.

I have also been able to track down alot of those nasty little IE bugs as well and fix them good and proper.

At this stage I think this is the best release of htmlarea, and I do feel that this will make htmlarea just able a default module at the top of everybodies list of contrib modules.

Warnings

The SpellChecker plugin for HTMLArea is not php but instead perl and executed as a cgi script. If you do not like cgi scripts or perl, please do not proceed.

Requirements

You are required to install the following software

• aspell and dictionary
• Text::Aspell
• XML::DOM
• CGI

Installation

Modify your http.conf and add or modify the following line.

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

Add the following .htaccess file to the Spellchecker plugin directory. This directory is usually in the path misc/htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker/ which is relative to the root of the drupal installation.

Options +execCGI

AddHandler cgi-script cgi
Order deny,allow

All going well this should then work.

Well a kind person has said that he is going to pay for me to add the ability for htmlarea to be able upload images to drupal or select from a list of preloaded images and put them into any node.

So over the last couple of weeks I have been bevering away in my spare time to enable htmlarea to upload files. This in some areas was a much bigger change that I thought.

Firstly I had to write the filtering system in the image module so that I would be able to attach images in a much better way to nodes. the standard image module added links to the image it displayed and also only displayed the thumbnail. I made changes to get rid of the url and made it so that it would download the image closes to the size of the image that was required, works alot better now.

I then had to create a plugin for htmlarea so that we could replace the standard insertImage functions so it will have a new popup that will display taxonomy categories and allow the user to upload images and select new one.

Well after alot of work I finaly worked out the problem with drupal, htmlarea and IE. I managed to track down the bug within htmlarea and I have fixed in the htmlarea's module cvs repository. I have also sent the patch to the htmlarea developers so I hope it will get applied soon.