This is the fourth point on my wish list for Drupal additions. This is the first one that is not intended as a module, but an improvement to the core itself.

This is the third point on my Drupal module wish list. You can look at the first two, nodeBB and book_arrange.

This is the second point on my wish list for Drupal modules (see the first one, nodeBB). This one is less about architecture and more about user interfaces - snazzy ones, using AJAX, jQueries and the like.

People who have spent any time authoring a book in Drupal know that what is generally advertised as a powerful feature is a heck of a pain to work with.

In the past few weeks, I've worked pretty instensively with Drupal every day. The result, as always, is that I'm amazed by what it can actually do, as well as disappointed by the great number of things it can't - or that are exceedingly inconvenient.

I realized that this will get lengthy, so instead of putting it all in one post I'll make a new post for each of the modules I'd like to see.

1. Make a node-based forum

The current core "forum" module is a joke. It's basically a disguised multi-user blog with posts sorted by their last comments.

When part-time webmasters have nightmares, they dream of Slashdot. Or, rather, of Slashdot publishing an article that links to their site.

Within minutes or hours, the site will be replaced by a message saying "This site has exceeded its transfer quota" or "The connection was reset while the page was loading" or (this is the worst part) the site will experience no problems, but the webmaster will shoot himself at the end of the month when the host slaps a couple of zeros to the bill for overdrawn bandwidth.

A few weeks ago, I said I would work on a Blogroll module for Drupal. This module was supposed to display a list of sites defined by each user in their profile, and be able to export this via JavaScript as well.

The last few weeks over at The Progressive Blogger Alliance have been filled with people asking to be put on the Blogroll. The Blogroll - actually one of the first efforts that the PBA grew from, before the network even used a central node based on Drupal software - was discontinued a while back. A mixture of administrative trouble, technical glitches and a rumor that the Google bot may interpret Blogrolls as link farms (and punish the sites' rankings).

After starting to use the bbCode plugin for Drupal (which incidentally makes a lot of things much easier, like Wikipedia links and quotes), I unfortunately spent over an hour revising the entries and the modules so that the page would be XHTML-valid again.

Headings cannot be inside a paragraph tag; did you know that? I do, now. This means that when bbCode converts a heading to an html tag, it needs to add a closing paragraph tag before it and an opening one after it.