I am finishing a Drupal based project which required that I explore areas of Drupal that were new to me. The result is that I have some snippets of code to share for certain situations that might be generally useful.

I’d like to talk more about what I expect to be doing this year, which as an experienced developer, might be somewhat interesting. Then, I’d simply like to speculate on how things that are already happening might play out.

In a previous post, “A Possible Approach to Importing Static Content Into Drupal”, I talked about trying to find a quick and dirty way to populate Drupal, in that case migrating existing static Web pages. What I came up with then wasn’t a complete solution, but I thought it might be a promising start.

Along similar lines, I recently started working on a site in which I created a custom content type with CCK and needed to quickly create multiple objects of that type using data from a client’s spreadsheet. After cleaning up the data in the spreadsheet (no matter how careful people think they are, they always enter dirty data in spreadsheets), I tried out a Drupal module that was new to me, Node Import.

Like any good CMS, Drupal is great at building new sites and maintaining existing ones, but when it comes to the largely mind numbing task of shoving in lots of existing static content, Drupal can seem agonizingly slow, as does any other mature CMS I have used in that situation. So, what are my options for trying to automate this task?

Recently, a friend that I commonly sub-contract with purchased a few copies of Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer, and he sent one to me. Although I initially thought that I wouldn’t get much out of this book–as its intended audience is non-technical–I read it. It was a free gift after all. And, I was pleasantly surprised by how informative I found it.