Sometime after my Drupal 5.1 upgrade — but before a day had passed — I noticed that line breaks and paragraphs were missing from my posted stories. That just didn’t seem right.
After a bit of searching on the Drupal site, I stumbled upon a solution. (See, for example, this thread.) I have my own custom input format that I call “Standard filter”. Each of the filters had started out with a standard weight of 10, which meant they all ran as one big glob.
I reordered the various filters in this custom input format until the rendering improved. The winning combination was one where the “Filtered HTML” filter was highest (with a weight of -10), coming before the various inline filters and so on that I’d added to my custom input format. I spread the rest of the filters along the weight scale, going all the way from -10 to 10. Having “Filtered HTML” come first in the priority queue makes some sense, as it gets to attack its problem set first before the “Line break” filter and others step in to do their duty.
I learned something about Drupal thanks to this problem. Even though it was a pain, I came away impressed. That pretty much summarizes all of the Drupal work I did over the weekend — I learned a lot and like Drupal more because of it.