With modules like CCK and Views developers rapidly create solutions with little custom module development. What if you need to deploy the same configuration of content types and views on multiple sites? The following example takes the power of the Views and CCK to create a sort of mashup module packaging your views and content type. I find this helpful time saver when having to repeat the same configuration on multiple sites.

While developing a module for search I was looking for a way to override the output of search results before they were displayed out on the page. I flipped through the pages of the book Pro Drupal Development and read about hook_search_page().

You may have a website packed with great information although if search engine spiders can't crawl your site, your results may show up lower in the results listings, or not at all. A properly configured robots.txt is one key that can help make sure your site is properly crawled and help boost your search engine ranking. Some module configurations can cause the crawling of improper results, duplication, or endless looping.

I've been doing some research and testing with Drupal measuring performance and scalability. Drupal has built in CSS and JavaScript aggregation (now in D6) to minimize the number of http requests, and caching via the database. In some cases with a high amount of traffic caching with the database is not enough. Modules like Cache Router allow the site caching to be handled by an engine other than the database to increase performance for larger amounts of traffic.

I needed a programatic way to deploy and install Drupal sites using an installation profile. I  found that I could use an automated installation profile to create new sites with basic customization rather quickly. I wanted to take this one step further to automate the installation process programatically. Drupal 5 makes creating automated install profiles straitforeward.

I was looking for a way to customize the Drupal node edit pages for specific content types and I found this article from Lullabot. It gives a great overview of the different ways to customize or override the core Drupal form fields. I used this to modify an node edit page to create a simplified version of the form for less technical users so they would not feel overwhelmed with the many customizable options that Drupal provides for a node.

I was excited more effort going into Drupal command line tools. In the past I’ve had to develop my own tools for deployment and updating Drupal on the command line. Drupal currently has limited tools for the command line in versions 5 and 6. I’m not sure about 7, hopefully it will be better. This Acquia blog post offers a collection of scripts to help deploy and maintain Drupal sites as well as some other features. Thanks Acquia!