Custom Formatters is just past three months now and I'm pleased to announce not one, but two new releases; 1.4 is now out of beta and 1.5 is now in beta.

Version 1.4 includes all the changes of the two betas, support for the Display Suite module, bulk operations (export and delete) and greatly improved preview functionality, plus a few additional hooks in preparation for 1.5.

One thing I've been meaning to do for a long time is re-design my blog or migrate it over to my portfolio site (http://stuar.tc/lark), because I really dislike this design, but unfortunately we don't always have time to do the things we want.

I did start looking into it again the other day and decided that part of the redesign/migration would be to integrate some sort of social networking bookmark service widget into the site, and the best one I've seen by far is the WordPress plugin: SexyBookmarks.

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.