When it comes to producing robust applications efficiently, choosing a framework is just the first step. Just as important, is familiarizing yourself with a framework’s plugins and knowing how to use them effectively.

I’ve been using Drupal regularly for about a year now, and I continue to be impressed with it. Not only is the framework itself robust and intelligently architected, but I’ve come to expect that when I need to add a new feature to a site, I can find an existing, mature plugin (or “module” in Drupal’s terminology) that implements it. Not only are these modules great in their own right, but they often work surprisingly well in conjunction with other Drupal modules.

There are so many modules, that it can be a little overwhelming at first. So, although the list of modules I am going to provide is obviously subjective, based on my own use of Drupal, I think it will help orient new Drupal users to some of the more commonly used Drupal modules.

I seem to be writing a lot of “first impressions” posts lately, and I’ve definitely been using several new tools recently. Its fun and strange at the same time; I am doing a lot of learning, which is fun and horizon expanding, but I am also coding less as a result, and because my knowledge of these new tools is necessarily superficial as a newbie, I know that the code I am writing is probably not very good. This week, I started gathering requirements on a project that I initially expected to be coding in JRuby on Rails, only to find out that eventually, I would be handing off the application to a development group that only wanted to support PHP. OK, I thought, I’ll just use CakePHP, which is a Rails clone and one of the best PHP MVC frameworks offered. I know PHP, and I know Rails, so the transition should be smooth. and overall, it has been so far.

In a recent episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass suggested that we are now living through a “Golden Age” of television, a time when the major networks are responding to increasing competition with greater experimentation and better quality programming overall. He suggests that we may not recognize that we are living through this era until after it is over, and we are left to ponder fond memories.

I suggest that we are experiencing a similar “Golden Age” of Web application development. I think its been going on for some time now, taking shape in a recognizable form in 2005 and really hitting its stride in 2006. And, I suspect it may have peaked already and that in a few years, some of us may look back on this time and romanticize it.

Although I’ve used many Web based applications that employ tagging, I’ve yet to create an application of my own with this feature. But now, I have two potential projects on the horizon that could benefit from tagging, and I’m thinking about how to best implement this, both in the database and user interface layers.

So, I thought I would explore how to implement tagging in my own applications, from scratch, and write about them on this blog. Therefore, I won’t pretend I have all the answers–or even necessarily any good answers–but I will simply be trying to think through how to approach implementing tagging, and I will welcome any constructive feedback on those thoughts.

Although AJAX is the all the buzz right now, and for good reason, you can increase your Web site’s usability in quick, simple ways that don’t require you to learn an AJAX library. To that end, I would like to point to some examples of smart Javascript and CSS tricks that some very bright and generous people have developed and made available to mere mortals like you and I.