Drupal Learning Journal 3. “Using Drupal” – Chapter 2 – Jumpstart

I borrowed two Drupal books from the library. “Using Drupal” was published in 2009, so it’s not that out of date. O’Reilly, the publisher, issues consistently great books, so I wasn’t hesitant to get this one. Not to mention that this was the latest non Drupal 7 book the local public library had. (The other book I got is for Drupal 7.)
At this stage of my learning there was nothing new in chapter one, “Drupal Overview”, for me. But I got a few useful ideas out of chapter 2, “Drupal Jumpstart”:

• The Taxonomy menu module turns a vocabulary into a Drupal menu that can be placed in Primary or Secondary links. (page 60 – it has a version for Drupal 7)
• If you are building a site where one user’s posts will be the primary content, all the extra pages and links from the blog module are a distraction. It’s simpler and less cluttered to create a custom content type called”Blog post” and leave the module turned off. (page 62 – I wish I had thought of this simple trick, when I was building socrelig.com. Now I need to do extensive theming. )
• Many Drupal sites employ the one-two punch of the modr8 module, which adds a “moderation queue” status to content and some nice previewing options, as well as the Revision Moderation module, a simple utility module that ensures that approved version of a module stays published when subsequent edits are made. (page 69 – modr8 will probably not be ported to Drupal 7 as even bugs for version 6 were not fixed. Revision Moderation isn’t even out of alpha for Drupal 6, but some users are working on patches for version 7.)
• Modules such as Textile or Markdown Filter provide the ability to take simple text such as **bold** and transform it into its HTML equivalent. This syntax, once learned, is much easier and faster to type in than raw HTML. (page 76 – Textile has Drupal 7 version, but the other one didn’t see any commits for 30+ weeks.)