Drupal has a great built-in caching mechanism that can significantly improve your site's performance, particularly for anonymous users. Once enabled, Drupal will automatically cache entire page views, on top of the automatic caching it does for menus, site variables, and content that has been filtered. Like most other aspects of Drupal, the caching system is extensible and is fully available to your custom module. There are two key aspects to learn for this technique: the Cache schema and the Cache API.

Yesterday, I responded to a forum question about CSS changes not appearing on a Drupal site. The user was frustrated that their updates were not appearing, even after clearing both their browser's and the Drupal site's caches. The subject of my response was "Start with Basic Troubleshooting" and it caused me to reflect on how this is one of my favorite questions when interviewing technical candidates.

There isn't a coder or administrator alive who gets everything right, the first time, every time. Invariably, all of us need to troubleshoot somethin' that just ain't workin' quite right. In mind my, a competent and seasoned professional has a good troubleshooting methodology as a result of experience; therefore, I consider this a critical question for almost any technical position and have been continually amazed at some of the responses I get.

One of the irrefutable needs for any website is, of course, hosting. Your choice of hosting provider can play a big part in the success of your site; presumably, you want your site to enjoy maximum uptime and you rely on your hosting provider to ensure its reliability.

A fair number of website development companies will happily provide hosting services, yet you should steer clear of this insidious trap. While it is OK to consider an independent hosting provider that your development team recommends, it's highly inadvisable to actually pay for your hosting through the development company for three primary reasons.

I recently responded to a Drupal forum question about adding a simple, visual progress bar to a website. While there are plenty of libraries for sophisticated graphing, since the user had a simple problem I proposed a simple solution based on just a little HTML and CSS.

The user wanted the value of the progress bar to be based on a number stored in his Drupal custom content type. So, I had him create a new theme file named “node-project.tpl.php" and add code to pull out the value and create a two DIV set. The outer DIV is the progress bar container, and the inner DIV displays the progress value.

Since you can’t directly program CSS, the solution uses an in-line style element. While normally you strive to avoid using these, in this case we are limiting its use to controlling only the width of the inner DIV; we will control all over attributes in the CSS, where they belong.

Note that the PHP code includes checks of the...