The past few months I've been working on a Drupal site and one requirement was for a mobile site. It needed to be a scaled down version of the site, with of course a simplified theme, and only a few features.

Today I was on Twitter and saw quite a number of people complaining about Drupal. It seemed strange that people would be so upset about a system so powerful, that's free and can do just about anything you can imagine a web site doing. But it got me to thinking about the barrier I had and others have before really getting into the Drupal state of mind.

A recent project that I am undertaking will involve integrating Ebay APIs with the Drupal Content Management system.

It's quite a large endevour, and while there has been a little bit of talk about it in the Drupal community, it seems it's never been carried through in a complete Drupal Module. I will be working to develop a set of Ebay Integration APIs to access information about items and users on Ebay and to update information and potentially even list items on Ebay through a Drupal website.

Time.  It's merciless no matter who you are.  It won't stop, it won't slow down, it won't give you any kind of break at all.  For those of us who operate under strict time deadlines, it gets even worse.  Whether you're working on visual design, complex code, or anything else with a client on the end of a line waiting for the time to be up, it doesn't make much difference.

Why is it that the Drupal documentation is so bad?  Well, perhaps that is an overstatement.  There are many people who put a lot of work into the documentation on drupal.org.  Still, it's very confusing from the outset to try to learn Drupal.  I've seen this commented on a number of times and given it quite a lot of thought myself now.  I joined the Drupal documentation team to see what I could do about it, and have made some contributions now myself.

With the web being the interactive place that it is today, there is no doubt that most sites need an easy way for users to express themselves. Since a large marjority of communication on the web is done with text, then the more control you have over that text, the more expressive you're able to be. In days gone by, the only choice was to hand code HTML tags. While this still works, only a very small percentage of people understand how this is done.

One of the first things you encounter when setting up a Drupal site is how to add images. Of course every site needs images, but Drupal's native image support is not so great. It requires hand coding image URLs into your content, which if you're a web designer isn't so difficult, but for anyone else using your site is a real pain.
 
There are lots of solutions available, 3 main ones, and 2 that I like and use.
 
The 3 main solutions are:

Well, perhaps it's an overstatement to say you can't live without them. But these are 10 modules I have found indespensible in the process of making web sites since Drupal 6 has launched.