This has been a great year for Drupal, and our first few months in the premium Drupal theme business! Here’s hoping 2009 brings Drupal site owners and service providers continuing success.

We’re picky, so we wanted to be selective and create a list of some lesser-known links, learning tools, modules, and useful information for both new and more experienced users to Drupal. Enjoy and feel free to add your favourites to the comments below!

→ Top five Drupal 6 screencasts
→ The best 3 books for learning Drupal
→ Avoiding common newbie mistakes
→ Boring sounding modules you didn’t know existed but that do really cool things
→ Fixing 7 Drupal annoyances
→ Drupal resources you’ll want to check out
→ Less obvious ways to keep up on the latest Drupal news

Top five Drupal 6 screencasts

There still aren’t a ton of screencasts for Drupal 6 — most out there are Drupal 5, especially for things like multimedia, CCK, and Views. But here are our top picks for Drupal 6 videos:

1. Understanding Drupal’s Content Types (CCK)
2. Creating a page view using taxonomy
3. Create a custom Drupal homepage
4. Modules and tips for Drupal SEO
5. Create a Drupal theme using three files

The best 3 books for learning Drupal

1. Using Drupal
2. Pro Drupal Development (if you’re a coder or an aspiring one)
3. Pick one that is most relevant to your area:
• Drupal 6 Themes
• Drupal Multimedia
• Drupal for Education and E-Learning
• Front End Drupal (coming soon)
• Drupal 6 Social Networking (coming soon)
• Cracking Drupal (coming soon)

Avoiding common newbie mistakes

I spend a lot of time helping out in the #drupal-support channel on IRC. These are a few issues that seem to come up again and again as issues that new Drupal users run into.

• Getting in over your head with theming when all you really need is a few CSS tweaks. Solution: CSS Injector
• Using the blog content type when you really want a story. The blog module adds those often-undesirable “So-and-so’s Blog” links, which new users tend to discover after the fact. Solution: Node Convert
• Module overload! All those amazing Drupal modules sure look tempting. Solution: Avoid the “open buffet syndrome” and take it slow. See what you can do with Drupal’s built in components, a little theming, and modules like CCK and Views first (see next point)
• Trying to come up with complex solutions using modules to control your site structure, and getting in over your head when you really just need to do some basic content organization. Solution: try basic CCK fields/taxonomy/Views (see, it’s even on a t-shirt!) and some light theming first, before you start throwing on modules like Category or using Contemplate
• Not having a backup. Solution: Backup & Migrate module. There, you no longer have an excuse.
• Not doing basic performance improvements. Solution: Guess what? Drupal can be kinda slow out of the box, especially on shared hosting. A little bit of tuning goes a long way.
• Not using block regions enough to create the kind of layout you actually want. Solution: learn more about regions (see the screenshot above on creating a custom home page), or check out the Panels module if you want to REALLY dive in to customized layouts

I now have a question for all the pros out there. I see this asked often but have come up empty handed: is there a way to batch change the comment status (read only to read/write, for example) on a bunch of existing nodes? You can always go into the database, but this strikes me as a “there should be a module for that!” situation.

Boring sounding modules you didn’t know existed but that do really cool things

String Overrides - easily make changes to bits of text on your site’s interface
Automatic Nodetitles - yep, node titles are required — but you can make them un-required and automatically generated with this
Global Redirect - prevent duplicate content and URLs and improve SEO
Views Bulk Operations - using Views, filter your content to perform batch tasks on them (much more advanced than the default content administration form)
Custom Links - add your own links to the bottom of nodes
Admin Role - automatically give all permissions to users with a certain role
Form Block - put any CCK, contact, etc. form into a block!
Computed Field - perform calculations of CCK fields in views using snippets

Fixing 7 Drupal annoyances

1. Drupal’s less-than-stellar contact form: Webform
2. No quick links to administer content: Admin:Hover
3. Inflexible user account creation and login: Login Toboggan
4. Things you can’t do by node type: Input filters, Teaser length
5. Drupal’s forum-that-doesn’t-really-look-like-a-forum: Advanced Forum
6. Inflexible settings and display for input filters: Better Formats
7. Not showing user login on Access Denied: Redirect 403 to User Login

Drupal resources you’ll want to visit

DrupalModules.com - module reviews, and check out the AJAXified Module Finder
Drupal Theme Garden - live demos of free Drupal themes
Showcases of Drupal sites:
- Drupal Museum
- Drupal SN
- DrupalSites.net

Less obvious ways to keep up on the latest Drupal news

IRC - the insiders know that the various chat rooms are REALLY the place to keep up on what’s happening in Drupal (#drupal) and get help (#drupal-support)
Digg posts about Drupal - see some interesting stuff that doesn’t hit drupal.org
Mailing lists - even if you’re not a developer, the development mailing list is often where news hits first
Google’s Blog Search - pretty self-explanatory!

Don’t forget to bookmark this post by clicking Share below, and the whole team at TopNotchThemes wishes you a great new year!