IVAN SOTO

In January I started in a full-time position at Incite Marketing as a Web Developer. Incite is a local marketing firm with more than 10 years in the field and while my job involves working with a CMS, I had to switch to Expression Engine so I won't be doing much work in Drupal, hence you won't see me posting about it too often. The reason is because I'm spending my extra time working on my Android projects.

This past monday I met a couple of Drupal developers and people who are actually interested in learning Drupal. The group was a nice mix of people sharing experiences and others trying to keep up and learn the most they can. It felt great, seeing what people expect from Drupal and what people have done with it, or what do they use Drupal for, but they all had one thing in common, it's always hard to find good modules or the one that you really need.

In Drupal you can take the same task in many different ways, the problem is when you get to the point where you realize that you should have chosen the other one. And here's an example.

So, this is my approach on reviewing some Drupal modules to let users know what kind of things you can do with them.

Let's start:

The old blog in Wordpress is now gone and I will be using Drupal from now on for my blog. The main reason of this is because I work with Drupal, it's also more flexible and overall I feel more comfortable working on it.

So far, besides the change on the platform there are not so many changes, but let's list them:

Design

Even cleaner, brighter and more attractive. I like to keep it simple, I love blue tones and my personal blog is the perfect excuse to use them.

The Work section also sports some nice selectors and some jQuery AJAX godness.

Plan your site before start building it

Cron - A Drupal site without crontab correctly set up can still work, and in most cases it will since you don't have any module depending on Cron to work. But if you use a module like Simplenews (for email newsletters) it will definitely need cron. Regardless of what module needs it, it's highly recommended to set up Cron. You can find more information on how to set up cron on the Drupal handbook.

Remove TXT files from root - It's never good to show the world which Drupal version are you running, that's why removing .txt files from the root will hide it. Actually you need to remove all txt files but robots.txt

Remove unused themes - I Drupal 5 I usually remove all folders under /themes but /themes/engines. In Drupal 6 I leave /themes/engines and /themes/garland since it's used for the update page.

• Pathauto: This module basically let you manage how you want to automatically create URL based on the content. Let's say we have 3 content types on our website: Blog post, links or page.