By default Drupal 7 has two types of views - The Full node view and the Teaser view. This has been the case for all previous versions of Drupal. However if your requirements are different, then you might have to create a custom view that is tailored to meet your specific needs. Check out how to create a simple custom “View mode” for nodes in Drupal 7.

The Drupal Menu System handles both the navigational system (visible menus and links) as well as the Drupal callbacks in the back end. The menu links listed on the header of a Drupal site is normally the primary menu or the secondary menu. These menus are sets of static links that you create via the Drupal admin interface. However sometimes it is useful to have a login / logout link in the primary or the secondary menu depending on whether the user is logged out or logged in. Here is how you add this.

On a Drupal site, when setting up pathauto for nodes, sometimes it is useful to have the full nested path of parent terms of the channel (or primary vocabulary) for the article in the url alias to give the impression of a directory structure to the taxonomy vocabulary. This will allow users to see urls to nodes like domain/term1/term2/term3/node-title-or-whatever where term3 is the channel under which the article is published.

Drupal is supposed to be a very secure CMS and the Drupal security team is a highly efficient team of people scouting the Drupal camp to find and sort out security issues as soon as they crop up. But no amount of programming will fix security issues caused by incorrect configuration of a Drupal site. Here is a checklist of items that you have to confirm after you deploy a new Drupal installation.

This is a basic installation instruction for installing Drupal in your shared cpanel hosting account. Although the instructions are for installing Drupal 7 and for installing it specifically on your cpanel hosting account, the steps outlined (or something similar) should work for installing other versions of Drupal or installing it in other hosting accounts. Read the complete instructions before trying this out.

Running Drupal on a shared hosting environment could become a challenge when the site starts getting a lot of visitors. So f you run your Drupal installation on one of the shared hosting providers like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Dreamhost etc and your site is reasonably popular then it is likely that you would have run into performance issues if the site is not configured correctly. If you configure your Drupal site correctly you should be able to stick with shared hosting for a longer period of time before moving on to dedicated hosting.

We have recently been toying with the Drupal API module in an attempt to set up our own Drupal API documentation site just like Lullabot did. As of today we have managed to set up something that is fairly functional and somewhat similar to the Drupal.org documentation site. Check out our own Drupal API reference site.

Drupal uses a reasonably powerful mechanism to create, prepare and send emails generated within the system. We maintain two modules related to emails in Drupal - Mail Merge and MailQ (Mail Queue) - and get the opportunity to work with the mail subsystem in Drupal. Here is a brief write-up on how the mail system works in Drupal.