Even Drupal has to take out the trash and wash it’s windows every once in a while. Ok, that sounds a bit silly, but what I’m talking about are those routine items which need to be carried out on some type of frequency - to keep your Drupal running smoothly.

It’s Drupal’s cron.php script which needs the love. It sits at the same level as the index.php script and it takes care of some of the “behind the scenes” stuff. It’s an important aspect to your site and knowing how to configure and set this up is what this video is all about.

In most every Drupal installation, there are a few (if not more) modules you inevitably end up installing and using.

Two of these are likely CCK and Views*. Then, all the other, shall we say, essential modules you end up hearing about, and installing as well.

Drupal’s Mutlisite feature sounds like the Holy Grail for whenever you want to run multiple Drupal sites. However, the answer to “Should I use Multisites?” is best discovered by knowing what Multisites is and how it might benefit or hinder your objectives.

In this video, I provide an overview of Multisites vs. Multiple Sites, and hopefully, the insight necessary to decide.

How do you keep anonymous visitors coming back to your Drupal site? In the ideal world, everyone who visits your site should join in and become a member right? Unlikely.

The Situation - You’ve just started your new Drupal site, and you’re wondering how you’ll manage those thousands (hopefully hundreds of thousands) of users and what they can and can’t do.

If you manage your own Drupal servers, and have shell access, one of your most powerful tools for deployment are CVS and SVN. Using the CVS deploy module, you can get rid of that tedious Download to computer -> upload via FTP process.

Drupal changes so fast that it’s hard to keep your head above water. Only now, are many site maintainers deciding to upgrade to version 6. The biggest reason for the delay, despite the amount of time version 6 has been out, is the slow going with various modules being updated.

So the question is… “How do I keep current with modules?”, and “What new modules replace the modules I’ve been using?”.

Well, much of this lies on your shoulders - such as reading the news. Fortunately, there are some tricks you can employ to get the information you need quickly.

Drupal provides a lot of default template files when it comes to page, node and block output.

There are, however, a few instances when you may want to theme a page based on the content type - such as having a dedicated page for when videos are viewed (I’m doing just such a thing on this site).

What you need to do then is tell Drupal about the dedicated and specific template file you wish to use for that content type. The way to do this is with preprocess functions.

There are those few times when you want or need JavaScript to be allowed within blocks or nodes.