A couple weeks ago my family spent some vacation time at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. If you have ever been to a Disney theme park then you know full well that it takes a lot of work in those parks just to have fun. Some of the most popular rides in these parks have waiting periods of up to two hours due to the long lines of people wanting to get on board. Luckily, my wife brought a Disney tourist guidebook that gave our family the helpful hints, recommendations, and information we needed to beat those long lines.  In the end, we ended up with a very enjoyable trip (so enjoyable that we got to ride Space Mountain twice!). That travel guide was a valuable asset to my family's vacation. 

Mastering Drupal is very similar to visiting a theme park as it takes some effort on your part to ensure you get rewarded for your effort. If Drupal is the amusement park then consider Drupal's modules as the park's attractions you're wanting to ride. With this line of thinking, I easily recommend that you let Earl and Lynette Miles' book, Drupal's Building Blocks, be your valuable tourist guide into the wonderful world of Drupal. I only review a few books each year and this is a book I gladly invested my time reading.

Drupal's Building Blocks is a tutorial, reference, and cookbook for some of Drupal's most valuable modules including CCK (Content Construction Kit), Views, and Panels. The primary purpose of this book is to give you the quickest route to mastering the modules as quickly as you can in order to help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites. The audience for this book isn't only for Web developers or designers, but also site administrators, content architects, and consultants. There is some code in this book, but what is there isn't the scary code you often find in a developer's library.

Although I've worked with Drupal for more than half a decade, I am still among the newbies who struggle with how best to use Drupal's contributed modules. I've built several sites using CCK and Views but I've always ran into hurdles that keep me from fullly discovering what these modules can do for me and my sites. This book will provide you the information you need to realize the full potential of these modules. Anybody who has seen Drupal, CCK, Views, and Panels mature over the years can't help but read this book and enjoy not only the author's technical expertise but also the author's cultural and historical understanding for how the module came to be in Drupal. 

In the first chapter of the book, "Introducing CCK and Nodes", there is a section titled "Quest for the Grail: How CCK Was Born". This section alone reads like an adventure story that starts by talking about the challenges site administrators originally had with Drupal needing to acquire development skills just to control the form content would take in Drupal. The story continues with Drupal 4.4 and how a contributed module named Flexinode gave non-developers the ability to create new content types yet limitations remained. I was reminded that with Drupal 4.7 CCK became Flexinode's replacement and with each successive release of Drupal the module continues to improve. For someone like me who started with Drupal 4.6 and watched Drupal 5, 6, and now 7 evolve this book spoke to my inner geek. I simply found this book to be good bridge to the more technical aspects of CCK, Views and Panels.

Nick Lewis posted his list of 40+ Essential Dupal Modules. The majority of the contributed modules on his list should be well known by most Drupal users.

If you are new to drupal, then this list is for you. These are some of the best of the best drupal modules. Everything from standard framework modules, to location and mapping is covered.

Since I've been around Drupal long enough, I don't expect these type of lists to provide me with a whole lot of new information. However, there is still great value in providing these lists for old and new Drupal users alike. For me personally, essential lists provide confirmation for whether or not I'm moving in the direction of more experienced users. Nick's list has inspired me to consider updating in the near-future my own outdated list of essential Drupal modules.

I've been using the contributed Drupal module WYSIWYG API since last Fall. Although the module is open source and free (offered under the GPL), I feel like I got it for a steal at $30 USD.

One of the most frequent criticisms by new users of Drupal has been that the content management system doesn't include a rich text editor (WYSIWYG) in its core. Historically, the core developers have opted to include an RTE option through contributed modules.  While the use of non-core Drupal modules for implementing WYSIWYG in Drupal is fine, the development pace, availability, and implementation of a particular RTE module (FCKEditor, TinyMCE, etc) has often varied when major versions of Drupal are released.

The Wysiwyg API attempts to improve the implementation and consistency of RTE's in Drupal. The module is capable of supporting any kind of client-side editor as long as there are support files available to integrate the external library with Wysiwyg API. Editors currently supported by the module include FCKeditor 2.6, jWYSIWYG 0.5, markItUp 1.1.5, NicEdit 0.9.0, TinyMCE 3, TinyMCE 2, and Whizzywig 55 (download).

Up to this point much of the work has been done by Daniel F. Kudwien (known as "sun" in the Drupal community). Since Daniel has invested a huge number of hours on this project he has asked users of the module to voluntarily contribute to the project financially. For someone like me who is not a developer, nor has a lot of free time, giving financially is way of showing appreciation for the open source products you use.  Even the smallest financial support can help the community and future development of the software.

If you're not comfortable with donating to an indivudual developer in your open source project, if available, you should consider taking membership in the project's association or foundation.  For instance, this week I'll be renewing my membership in the Drupal Association.  Many of these open source groups such as the Drupal Association use the membership revenue to support the maintenance and growth of the infrastructure that Drupal.org runs on, as well as to produce various conferences and workshops around the planet.

This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks.  While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to ping me so much.  It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com.  But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development.  Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.

To make a long story short, I'm testing a number of ways I can use a Web content management system more efficiently to run this site.  I also want to do some restructuring of the site so that I have more flexibility in the look and feel of the site as well as how the content is delivered.  For the most part, I'll be using Pathauto, Views, Panels, and one of the aggregation modules.  I'm currently testing the FeedAPI module for aggregation, but none of the aggregation related modules really do what I want them to do.  I'll put up a site recipe in the next month or two on the modules I finally settle on to support this site.

Now it is time for me to go.  Evidently, one of the modules I've installed is causing some cron issues.  Am I having fun, yet?  Yes, I am.