Drupal is no doubt a user friendly web platform that is specially designed for the convenience of the users. The step-by-step guidelines prepared in the website are easy to follow. But adding features (modules) to the system isn’t always simple and some of the contributions take a bit of “help” to work properly. Drupal serves several specific features that shape the attractiveness of the Drupal platform. But , I would like to point few things that may bother you while developing a site with drupal.

The first and foremost issue is drupal’s Cache clearing Problem. I have been having a lot of caching issues with drupal and it’s driving me up the wall. I make changes to the templates and they are not being reflected unless the user is logged in. Because I had to test stuff for when the user is not logged in, this was rather irritating. This occurs in both IE and firefox (not browser specific). You can truncate the 6 cache_* tables in the database at regular interval to clear the cache or by patching .htaccess or patching includes/bootstrap.inc. As a last option you can turn off caching.

Choosing a theme is very important from the beginning , if you are planning for a well customised site. Don’t just start working on any template with an idea to change it later. You will pay for this mistake. As you will need to do coding in the template files for customization, there may not be a scope to change your templates at a later stage of development.

There is a huge list of contributed themes. Not only can you download and create new themes but also theme engines (smarty, phptempate xtemplate,..). This can make it a little confusing at first but the documentation for each theme will tell you what is required.

At drupal.org you will get a good store of modules but don’t be enticed by the huge number of modules available in hand. Analyse before going for a module.

In drupal there are links to create content that anyone can follow easily. When a front-end user decides to make a “page”, he/she will be confronted by a plain area to enter text, with no WYSIWYG editing capabilities. It actually considered to be good, because there are many problems with Web-based WYSIWYG editors. However, less than advanced users will be pretty helpless putting content into Drupal. ( You can go for TinyMCE module or other modules that serves this purpose, but be ready to solve the issues with them. For Tinymce module I can say that it’s easy to integrate but when you need to create 2/3 new profiles to display on different pages, you can have them for different Roles (of site users) but a single user can’t have more than one RTE profile for , say, blog entry and event entry pages. )

Drupal’s ‘Advanced Search’ and the scoring factors it uses are marvellous. The search results can be fine tuned using the controls. The scoring factors for weighing the search result are based on keyword relevance, recency, number of comments, and the number of page views. But when you need to make such a search form apart from the default one, it’s a full time job. There is no easy way to solve this problem. You need to dive into the core of the search function. As a option you can use the Views module to create search forms by exposed filters, but that must go with your design requirements too.

At last , don’t loose patience, sometimes it’s all there but you can’t see them as you haven’t set up the correct permissions of each module for specific user roles.

For many first time users of Drupal, Drupal doesn’t leave them with a very good first impression. It’s only after you spend some time with Drupal that you begin to discover it has a number of traits that make it an outstanding application to build your website around. Hope I will come back eventually with a good second or third impression.