Sometimes you just need a quick solution, using the built in functionality of modules you are already using without adding extra modules to your site. For example, you might want to add a country field to a node using CCK without the overhead of a complex module like Location.

Here's an easy way, just use a standard text field, with a "Select List" widget. You then just need the data to create the options. Here's the data you need, ready to copy and paste into the options for the CCK widget.

I recently spent an interesting 8 days in Serbia, talking about Web 2.0, Social Software and its use in Youth in Action programmes. I'd never been to Serbia before and I immediately found some "cultural differences". You can see the view I had from my hotel window in the attached photo. Yes, a bomb! Not what I expected to see when staying in a hotel at the top of a mountain in a national park.

Tickets are available for the next Drupal conference. It's in Paris. I'm planning on being in London the week before, just need to sort out some accommodation for Paris. The combined tickets for Szeged saved lots of time and money - doesn't look like there's anything similar for Paris yet.

http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/

Here's a quick way to add recent tweets to your Drupal powered websites. The following code is as simple as possible. Add it to your site's module folder and enable the module. You they get a block to position on your site. The block is populated with your most recent tweets via a Javascript call to the Twitter website.

Here's a quick one. mysqldump is useful for backing up your Drupal website database (also look at mysqlhotcopy for MyISAM only databases). If you use the Drupal search system on your site then you probably have a massive search index. This index often takes up just as much space as the rest of the site, and can always be rebuilt so doesn't need to be backed up. mysqldump includes an option to exclude tables. For example:

Discourse is still at a very early stage, so there's no code to share just yet. At this stage most of the work is going into R&D. The priorities are (1) simple extensible structure, easily customised and rigorous cross browser compatibility, and (2) adopting best-practices for accesiblitiy, usability and seo/indexability.

I mentioned previously that I'm keeping an eye on the new features coming up in Drupal 7, and there's a biggie confirmed over at d.o with the inclusion of CCK fields in Drupal core. The delay in release of CCK and Views for Drupal 6 has been the main reason for the slow migration to Drupal 6 from Drupal 5, and moving key functionality like this into core can only be a good thing.

I recently discovered the Thesis theme framework for Wordpress and was inspired to start a similar project for Drupal. I have recoded this completely from scratch (Thesis is a commercial product), but I have already been using Blueprint CSS in many projects recently so I decided to use this as a starting point for the first version. I want to move to more semantic markup in time, but Blueprint is a good starting point.

Got to say this first: I'm not a lawyer, so this does not constitute legal advice.

There are loads of configuration options in Drupal core, and no doubt you'll have modules installed that add loads more options. Here's a mixture of configuration and admin tasks that you should make sure are completed before putting your Drupal website live. From caching and CSS aggregation to improve the performance of the site, to SEO tweaks to your htaccess and robots.txt files...