Below is list of Drupal survival guides from people who have been there! Have you tackled a Drupal project and survived? If so, send us a note and you can take us on our next guided adventure!
One of the small annoyances of Drupal 'out of the box' is the fact that the admin menu isn't expandable. Here are a few modules that create expandable admin menus
One way to tell if a module is ready to install on a 5.x version of Drupal is to check out this page
http://drupal.org/node/82257
Another is to see if there is a .info file in the latest distribution - all modules that are ported to 5.x will have one.
Drupal is most often thought of as a community space. However, it functions just as well for a personal space, as well. The following outlines some of the ways you can customize Drupal to function as a Personal Learning Environment (PLE).
How best to optimize a Drupal for use at a Conference
Alex and Arvind's NYCIST'06 Drupal
http://www.nycist.net/d/
We used a base installation of Drupal 4.7.4 for the above conference site. No extra modules.
We set up the site -- with authentication so folks need to be approved before they are allowed to blog because regular users can use the blog.
We did this -> Administer >> Settings >> Users
We used the blog api so that everyone can post in Access Controls.
We used taxonomy for a free form and formal tags on all posts. This allowed us to add the link at the top of the site for the NYSAISEDTech2006 posts as well as the 'right link' to keynotes.
I added a feedburner feed for the rss and podcast feed from the site. We heavily used the Aggregator module to aggregate del.icio.us, flickr, and technorati rss feeds.
Lots more to add, but this is a start....