Intermediate

It's no coincidence the title of this video corresponds with exactly what you're probably trying to do with your Drupal site. Squeeze every bit of performance you can from whatever server you're on. Shared hosting, dedicated box, virtual server, you name it. So how does the mere Drupal user or admin get stellar performance out of Drupal?

It turns out, the tried and true method for the fastest web page response is simply allowing the web server to spit back a simple html page - just like the good old days of Web 1.0.

Now, Drupal is a complex Content Management System with years of personal investment by many talented and enterprising minds. It has a feature rich database with many creative optimizations in place.

In the beginning was the Event module. It was the de facto standard for managing calendar types of data. That was before CCK. Content Construction Kit saw fit to bring about many changes in the world of Drupal.

With the rise of Views module, a new era was born. Shortly after, the super talented developer KarenS created Date module and Views and Date got together. Their offspring was the Drupal Calendar module.

And from that time on, a Drupal calendar was easily possible with date and time harmony spreading across the land.

The Drupal menu system is very smart about when it shows menus. It knows when a user has access to the menu, based on the roles the user has, and ultimately, the permissions the user has.

This is a great feature of Drupal. However, you still need to provide some form of navigation. Out of the box, Drupal provides a Navigation menu and both Primary and Secondary links menus. No matter which one you choose to use, you can enhance this navigation by making it easy for users to get to where they want to go - or even better, help them find the content they may be interested in.

In this video, I discuss the use to two different modules in particular. Dynamic Persistent Menu and the Me modules.

When it comes to Web 2.0, it's all about the GUI, UX, UE, WYSIWYG, FTW, WTH*. Ok, ok, enough acronyms. Let's just leave things simple. "I saw this cool feature on another web site and I want that feature too."

Typically, the feature you're seeking to incorporate entails the use of AJAX or Javascript. While the cost for adding such features used to be quite high, the use of jQuery and its firm acceptance within Drupal make things much easier.

"Twitter me this, twitter me that," can anyone listen to or read any Internet media news and not hear about Twitter? Not likely these days. It seems that celebrity and competition has driven Twitter to become that latest Internet fad.

Wait as second? A fad? Well, only time will tell if that's the case. Currently (to me at least), it seems like Twitter is yet another channel for social communication between multiple parties. If you think in terms of RSS, with a 140 character limit - (some times it's better if some people talk less*) -, you simply have the same selective personal input with some useful conventions providing some uniquely new levels of information access.

Drupal is all about two things, content and management. Ok, so that was a cheesy one about Drupal being a CMS. But,the biggest advantage Drupal has, as I see it, over many other CMS's is both its flexibility and the number of contributions made to extend what it can do. Quite literly, there are new modules every week (RSS feed) which make Drupal do things you probably want it to do.

Herein lies the problem. Knowing what modules do, which ones to use and how to find them. If your goal is simply to allow other users to contribute content to your site with a degree of control over who can contribute, how they contribute and what the process is, then this video will get you started.

One of the most time-consuming tasks for any new Drupal site is setting up and testing what users can and can't do. This is the realm of user permissions and role permissions. I'm guessing you've visited the checkbox maze - as I like to call it.

One of the most frustrating aspects of Drupal's Permissions screen is this; with any number of roles beyond a few, and with a large collection of modules, the task of permissions management becomes quite hazardous. The potential for "accidentally" checking one little box which gives the wrong role the wrong access and allows the wrong user to do the wrong things, it's no wonder managing Drupal permissions can become unnerving.

Enter my solution to this problem. A collection of modules which extend the level of control, make it easier to focus on the permissions that matter (relative to what you're setting up at the time), and remove the visual clutter from this extensive web page.

The definition of a workflow, according to Wikipedia, is a "depiction of a sequence of operations". When taken at face value, a workflow is typically something you want to automate in Drupal. In other words, what we're talking about is Drupal Automation and my guess is, you'll want to automate things in Drupal based on certain events.

The confusing part of Drupal automation is the fact that you need to know what works together to accomplish such automation. With the modules of Workflow, Actions*, Triggers* (* Part of Drupal 6 core) and Rules, it can be quite confusing when it comes to automation.

Using View's Relationships is quite simply a matter of knowing how "one piece of content relates to another". If you can wrap your head around this simple concept, then all your complex Drupal views will be realized quickly.

The most common use of Views relationships will center around content types which utilize some form of "reference" field type. This will likely be either User references or Node references - but won't be limited to these field types for use in Views relationships.

Understanding how the data is stored within the Drupal database is also a big help to achieving your goals.

If you start with the data and relationships in mind first, then arriving at your ultimate goal will become much easier.

Is there any other activity more popular on the Internet than searching? Probably not. In fact, I'd be willing to double-down on that wager (I'm on the side of searching being the most popular if it wasn't obvious).

What's that number one site on the nets? Oh yeah, it's Google - and they do search.

So, this simply means one thing. Your focus on Drupal search should be close to number one. The default search in Drupal works okay, and just a bit beyond, if you're searching for "cool" and "cool" stuff exists. However, searching for "cool" doesn't cut it when "coolness" is the title for all your cool nodes. Your users pretty much have to hit the right words spot on.