I'm happy to announce that Custom Formatters 1.3 is now available for download.

The primary changes this time around are:

• Previews
  See live previews of your formatters during creation.
• API Hooks
  Developers can now improve support between their modules CCK field and the Custom Formatters module.
• More tokens
  Per request, I've added some much needed tokens to Custom Formatters to help with the creation of formatters.

Read on for more information.

When I first released the Custom Formatters module I was sure I had made the task of creating a CCK Formatter easy, but instead I had only made it easier. It turns out I was looking at the module from the perspective of a developer with a sound knowledge of PHP and the Drupal API, not from the perspective of a user with only basic HTML knowledge, so with this new (likely short term) view on module development, I give you Custom Formatters 1.2.

I just can't help myself, whenever I get an idea for a Drupal module stuck in my head, especially one that makes so much sense, I just have to write it.

Only a few days ago I got a feature request for my Drag'n'Drop Uploads (DnDU) module that I instantly dismissed. The user wanted the ability to modify the templates for the output that gets injected into a Textarea upon a successful Drag'n'Drop upload; While the idea had merit, DnDU takes advantage of the CCK/Field Formatters functionality, not defining the templates nor the template system itself.

My original opinion was for the user to simply write their own formatter inside of a custom module, as that is what I would do in that situation, but after I gave it a bit more thought I decided that the ability to write your own custom formatters inside of the Drupal back-end would not only be quite useful, it would also be quite easy to write... so I did.

Being notorious for my constant development builds with stable releases few and far between, and with so many ideas to play with, I decided that the best course of action would be to put Drag'n'Drop Uploads into a beta cycle.

And while I'm at it, how about a quick video to show off the new beta release:

I've been hard at work over the last week trying to get support for the WYSIWYG module into the Drag'n'Drop Uploads module, and have done exactly that. You can now Drag and Drop a file straight from your desktop, drop it onto your WYSIWYG editor and everything should be peachy, one uploaded file displayed inside the WYSIWYG.

I say should as there are still a few issues.

The biggest known issue is that the WYSIWYG support is not currently work with Google Gears, which means support is currently limited to Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 3+ and Safari 4+, but I hope to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

There are other issues related to the WYSIWYG module that are completely out of my hands, but thankfully using the natively supported browsers with either FCKeditor or TinyMCE (the superior WYSIWYGs IMO) is relatively issue free.

To see the new functionality in action, head over to the recently released Drag'n'Drop Uploads demonstration site where you can test it out for yourself.

For more information, or to download the latest versions, head to the project page.